title: Performance of local domain vs localhost
body: <p>Is there a performance difference between TCP connections to:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>localhost / 127.0.0.1</li>
  <li>a domain which resolves to the local machine</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Or more specifically, do the latter connections go through the loopback device, or over the actual network?</p>
  
  <p>The reason I'm asking is I'm thinking about changing database settings in many PHP apps so they use a full domain instead of localhost. That way we could more easily move the database to a different server, if the need arises.</p>