I recently switched from ext/mysql to mysqli in a PHP project. In that project, I extensively used the connection reuse feature of mysql_connect by setting the new_link parameter set to false.
As far as I understand, there is no such mechanism in mysqli_connect; it will always return a new connection even though the same host and user is used. Is this correct? Is there some other function that can mimic the reuse-behaviour?
NB: I see that with prepending the host with p: will create a persistent connection. However, this cannot be used in my case, as part of my project relies on temporary tables.
Update:
The actual mysqli object is embedded in a DB handler class which manages access to the database. This handler is always used to interact with the DB.
I oversimplified my problem because I just wanted to focus on the question if mysqli can automatically reuse a single connection by multiple calls to mysqli_connect with identical parameters. My project is an extenstion to a framework and provides multiple entry points and hooks. I cannot control the order or number of function calles from the hosting framework into my extension. Each part of my extension creates an instance of the DB handler, but could reuse the actual underlying connection.
The creation of the DB handler is done though a db-factory. So I will probabely have to implement some sort of connection-caching there myself...