At itoctopus, we have a strong passion for optimizing Joomla websites, that’s why we always research new ways that may improve their performance. We mostly focus on optimizing the database because sometimes a simple database optimization can have a huge impact on the overall performance of the Joomla website. This time it was no different.
However, the database optimization that we attempted wasn’t about optimizing a query, or indexing a field, or modifying the my.cnf file (the MySQL global configuration file). It was about answering the million dollar question that many have asked but no one has given a straight answer to: “Does closing the connection to the MySQL database cause a performance hit”? Many have provided theories and opinions about this, but none (as far as we know) has given an answer based on an actual experiment. We decided to be the first ones to provide a real, experiment-based answer to this question, not only because it hasn’t been answered before, but also because we were very curious.
Joomla does explicitly close the connection to MySQL in the mysqli.php file which is located under the libraries/joomla/database/driver folder. So we decided to do the following test:
- Run the following ab (Apache Benchmark) on an unmodified Joomla 3.8.1 website (with test data installed) with n concurrent connections, where n is 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50:
ab -c n -t 10 "http://www.joomla381.com/" -
Remove the following line from the aforementioned mysqli.php file (note: the line is in the disconnect function):
mysqli_close($this->connection); - Run the above ab test again on the modified Joomla website, where the MySQL connection is no longer closed.
Unlike our comparison between the performance of Joomla 3.7.5 and Joomla 3.8.1, we didn’t get any exciting data. The data was more or less the same. A few milliseconds here and a few milliseconds there. Nothing of significance was observed. There was no constant advantage for one over the other.
In fact, we thought (hoped?) that not closing the connection would provide a boost (albeit a negligible one) to the performance of the Joomla website, and this is because there is overhead in opening and closing MySQL connections, but it seems that such an advantage (if it really existed in the first place) was offset by something else.
So there you have it! There is no advantage in not closing the connection to the MySQL database on a Joomla website. If you have a different experience, then please comment below. If you need help optimizing your Joomla website, then please contact us. We are experts in Joomla optimization, our work is clean, and our fees are right!