The mysql_pconnect() function opens a persistent MySQL connection.
This function returns the connection on success, or FALSE and an error on failure. You can hide the error output by adding an '@' in front of the function name.
mysql_pconnect() is much like mysql_connect(), but with two major differences:
This function will try to find a connection that's already open, with the same host, username and password. If one is found, this will be returned instead of opening a new connection
The connection will not be closed when the execution of the script ends (mysql_close() will not close connection opened by mysql_pconnect()). It will stay open for future use