My whole point originally was that I want the servers to be able to support the same number of persistent connections (if necessary) as concurrent web requests since the vast majority of the web requests need database access. There is no point in being able to have 10,000 concurrent web requests being served if you can only have 100 database connections.

And yes, always try to do things as efficiently as possible. For example there are a couple backend routines that read from the database occasionally and then process some stuff for 10 seconds and then write to the DB. For those cases where we know there’s going to be a huge gap between queries, we actually release the persistent connection for another process to use and then reacquire it when we actually need it.

With ADO.net, as long as you specify the same connection string, it will attempt to reuse a connection. 99.9% of the time it does this. However, if another is using the connection it does create a new one. “Closing” a connection really just leaves it in a state to be reused.

The equivenent in PHP (I’m assuming you’re using PHP) would be to use mysql_pconnect I believe. http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-pconnect.php

The sensible guy in me knows you are doing everything right… but the “Cliff Clavin” in me can’t let the topic go.

Also you have an issue if you ever need to run slow queries where those slow queries can eat up some of the query threads while they are running.