I'm trying to figure out the best way to minimize resource utilization when I have PHP talking to various backend services (e.g. Amazon S3 or any other random web services -- I'd like a general solution). Ideally, I'd like to have a single persistent connection to the backend (or maybe a small pool of persistent connections) with some caching, and then have all of the PHP tasks share it. We can consider it all read-only for the purposes of this question. It's not obvious to me how to do this in PHP. There's the database-specific stuff like mysql\_pconnect(), but that doesn't really do it for me.

One idea I've had, which seems seems somewhat suboptimal (but is still better than having every single request create and destroy a new connection) is to use a local caching proxy (in a separate process) that would effectively do the pooling and caching. PHP would still be opening and closing a connection for every request, but at least it would be to a local process, so it should be a little faster (and it would reduce load on the backends). But it doesn't seem like this kind of craziness should be necessary. There's gotta be a better way. This is easy in other languages. Please tell me what I'm missing!