I spend a lot of time working in PHP, and one thing I run into a lot, is garbage collection. It’s important to make sure you DB connections are closed when the script finishes excution, or it can cause other problems (like memory, resources, etc).

So I handle my DB connection through a very simple class that is set up to do a mysql disconnect at the end of the script’s execution.

class DbConn {
  public $conn;
  public function __construct($host,$user,$pass,$db) {
    $this->conn = mysql_connect($host, $user, $pass) or die("Couldn't connection to $host");
    mysql_select_db($db,$this->conn);
  }
  public function __destruct(){
    mysql_close($this->conn);
  }
}
$dbconn = new DbConn("localhost","mydbuser","mydbpass","mydbname");
define( "DBH", $dbconn->conn );

Then when you do your database queries, you just make sure to include the DBH handle in the code.

$result = mysql_query("Select * from people",DBH);

When the script ends, the code makes sure it closes your database connections.

This can be built on quite a bit to include handling of mysql queries, but I wanted to at least share this simple class that has gotten a lot of use in various projects and has come in handy several times.