Key Features

The key features of mysqlnd_mux are as follows:

• Transparent and therefore easy to use:

  • Supports all of the PHP MySQL extensions.

  • Little to no application changes are required, dependent on the required usage scenario.

• Reduces server load and connection establishment latency:

  • Opens less connections to the MySQL server.

  • Less connections to MySQL mean less work for the MySQL server. In a client-server environment scaling the server is often more difficult than scaling the client. Multiplexing helps with horizontal scale-out (scale-by-client).

  • Pooling saves connection time.

  • Multiplexed connection: multiple user handles share the same network connection. Once opened, a network connection is cached and shared among multiple user handles. There is a 1:n relationship between internal network connection and user connection handles.

  • Persistent connection: a network connection is kept open at the end of the web request, if the PHP deployment model allows. Thus, subsequently web requests can reuse a previously opened connection. Like other resources, network connections are bound to the scope of a process. Thus, they can be reused for all web requests served by a process.

Limitations

The proof-of-concept does not support unbuffered queries, prepared statements, and asynchronous queries.

The connection pool is using a combination of the transport method and hostname as keys. As a consequence, two connections to the same host using the same transport method (TCP/IP, Unix socket, Windows named pipe) will be linked to the same pooled connection even if username and password differ. Be aware of the possible security implications.

The proof-of-concept is transaction agnostic. It does not know about SQL transactions.

Note:

Applications must be aware of the consequences of connection sharing connections.

About the name mysqlnd_mux

The shortcut mysqlnd_mux stands for mysqlnd connection multiplexing plugin.