I hadn't considered using persistent connections, and that does make sense. However, for me personally, I've stopped considering persistent connections as a good option since running into a couple of situations where I ran out of database connections by using them. What happens is that with Apache (and probably other multi-process web servers), the pool of persistent connections is not shared between processes, so you can have a bunch of idle connections hanging around, but a new child process still has to attempt a new connection. So, depending on how many connections your database server can accept, how long connections are kept, and the number of processes Apache is using, you can easily run into situations where you don't have any free connections even though the actual server load is low.
