I finally ended up switching to MySQLi because it offered ping and
reconnect options. For some reason I kept getting MySQL Server has
gone away with PDO, even with persistent. I tried many different ways
to detect that and then reconnect, but PDO just doesn't support it. I
will be making the
Good suggestions. The fastest connection to mysql (if you're using
mysql, of course) will likely be via the mysqli extension API, and
with the mysqlnd driver. PDO is quite lightweight, though, so it
probably isn't a big slowdown point for you. It will use the mysqlnd
driver if you have it
