title: How to speed up mssql_connect()
body: <p>I'm working on a project where a PHP dialog system is communicating with a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and I need more speed on the PHP side.</p>
  
  <p>After profiling my PHP scripts, I discovered that a call to mssql_connect() needs about 200 milliseconds on that particular system. For some simple dialogs this is about 60% of the whole script runtime. So I could gain a huge performance boost by speeding up this call.</p>
  
  <p>I already assured that only one single connection handle is produced for every request to my PHP scripts.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to speed up the initial connection with SQL Server? Some restrictions apply, though:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>I can't use PDO (there's a lot of legacy code here that won't work with it)</li>
  <li>I don't have access to the SQL Server configuration, so I need a PHP-side solution</li>
  <li>I can't upgrade to PHP 5.3.X, again because of crappy legacy code.</li>
  </ul>