Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
No such thing as a small change

Re: Using a single database handle or multiple handles

by blue_cowdawg (Prior)
on Oct 11, 2012 at 13:18 UTC ( #998443=note: print w/ replies, xml ) Need Help??

in reply to Using a single database handle or multiple handles

      Specifically, is it more efficient to connect once

There is some "setup time" involved with connecting to a database so I'd recommend doing that only once. One of the techniques I use for this involves writing a module that acts as a singleton. Here is a simplified example of that:

package Customer::EmployeeDB; use DBI; my $instance = undef; sub new { if($instance) { return $instance; } else { bless { dbh=> undef } ,"Customer::EmployeeDB"; $self->{dbh}=DBI->connect ("DBI:mysql:database=employee","user +","secret") or die $DBI->errstr; $instance=$self; return $self; } } sub prepare { my ($self,$shift)=@_; my $sth=$self->{dbi}->prepare($sql) or die $self->{dbi}->errstr; return $sth; } 1;

An example of using that module:

| handwaving here use Customer::EmployeeDB; my $db = new Customer::EmployeeDB(); my $sth = $db->prepare("select * from employee order by surname"); $sth->execute(); | do something with it

As I said, that's an incredibly simplified version of the actual family of modules I crafted to do the work. I actually go one step further and create modules to encapsulate the queries against the database and those modules instantiate the module encapsulating the database.

Using the singleton behavior ensures that only one connection to the database is made within the entire script. When I profiled the resultant code I was amazed at how much time it took to connect to the database (the real world example was against Sybase, so your mileage may vary) relative to where time was spent elsewhere. The code I had inherited actually made multiple connections to the database and the client wondered why it ran so poorly.

Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional

Comment on Re: Using a single database handle or multiple handles
Select or Download Code
Re^2: Using a single database handle or multiple handles
by mpeppler (Vicar) on Oct 24, 2012 at 12:16 UTC
    Connecting to a modern Sybase server can cost between 100 to 300ms, depending on the amount of stuff that each connection needs to set up (e.g. if there are a lot of roles associated with the login being used, then this will take additional time).

    It also puts a fairly heavy load on the server (we had systems with > 200k new connections per day which were showing very serious performance issues).

    So I would always strive to limit the number of connections that you create, both for speed, and for load on the server.


Log In?

What's my password?
Create A New User
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://998443]
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this? | Other CB clients
Other Users?
Others studying the Monastery: (11)
As of 2014-07-10 15:30 GMT
Find Nodes?
    Voting Booth?

    When choosing user names for websites, I prefer to use:

    Results (213 votes), past polls