where's the best place to close the DB connection? - php

In this code I think maybe it would be best to close after both the if and else but it seems off to close it twice.
<?php
$member_id = "";
require("connect.php");
if (isset($_POST['member_id']))$member_id = fix_string($_POST['member_id']);
$sql=("DELETE FROM members WHERE member_id = '$member_id'");
$res = mysqli_query($con, $sql);
if (mysqli_affected_rows($con) == 1) {
echo "member with ID of ".$member_id." has been removed from members table";
} else {
echo "member was not deleted";
}
function fix_string($string) {
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) $string = stripslashes($string);
return htmlentities ($string);
}
?>

It is very common practice to open the db connection at the beginning, and close your connection once at the end. You don't need to do it in the middle of your code.
Closing database connections isn't absolutely required, as seen in the PHP manual page for mysql_close(), but it is considered good practice by many to do so.
There is a rare exception to this. If your program is going to be doing some heavy processing for several minutes, you might want to close the db connection before this. If you need it again after the processing, open the db connection again. The reason for this is that the MySQL connection will eventually time out, and then it may lead to more problems in your program.

Using mysql_close() isn't usually necessary, as non-persistent open links are automatically closed at the end of the script's execution.
Straigh out from the php manual.

Related

best practise to do many connections mysqli

I received max_user_connections error this days. and I was wondering if I am doing something wrong.
I have a config.php file with mysqli connection script:
$mysqli = new mysqli('localhost', 'my_user', 'my_password', 'my_db');
so pages where I need to get something in mysqli I include config.php. here is an example:
example.php
<?php
include_once("config.php");
$stmt = $mysqli->prepare("select...");
$stmt->execute();
$stmt->bind_result(...,...);
while($stmt->fetch()) {
...
}
$stmt->close();
?>
some html <p> <img>...
<?php
$stmt = $mysqli->prepare("select...");
$stmt->execute();
$stmt->bind_result(...,...);
while($stmt->fetch()) {
...
}
$stmt->close();
?>
some html <p> <img>...
<?php
$stmt = $mysqli->prepare("select...");
$stmt->execute();
$stmt->bind_result(...,...);
while($stmt->fetch()) {
...
}
$stmt->close();
?>
So, my question is: is it the best practise to do selects like this? should I close mysqli connect after each select and open again? or do selects on the top together without separete than with some html in the middle?
the best practise to do selects like this?
I hate it when people use the term "best practice" it's usually a good indicator they don't know what they are talking about.
The advantage of your approach is that its nice and simple. But as you've discovered, it does not scale well.
In practice its quite hard to measure, but in most applications the MySQL connection is unused for most of the lifecycle of the script. Hence there are usually big wins to be made by delaying the opening of connection and closing it as soon as possible.
The former can be done by decorating the mysqli class, the connect method just stores the credentials while anything which needs to talk to the database should call the wrapped connect method when it needs access to the database. However typically the yeild of this approach is low unless your code creates a lot of database connections which are never used (in which case a cheaper solution would be to increase the connection limit).
It can take a long time after the last query is run before the connection is closed down. Explicitly closing the connection addresses this, but requires a lot of code changes.
do not open and close a connection for each query. Although it will result in a reduced number of connections to the databasee, the performance will suck
The biggest win usually comes from optimizing your queries - reduced concurrency and a better user experience.

Improve code that periodically query SQLite database

I have an sqlite database that I query from PHP periodically. The query is always the same and it returns me a string. Once the string changes in the database the loop ends.
The following code is working, but I am pretty sure this is not the optimal way to do this...
class MyDB extends SQLite3
{
function __construct()
{
$this->open('db.sqlite');
}
}
$loop = True;
while ($loop == True) {
sleep(10);
$db = new MyDB();
if (!$db) {
echo $db->lastErrorMsg();
} else {
echo "Opened database successfully\n";
}
$sql = 'SELECT status from t_jobs WHERE name=' . $file_name;
$ret = $db->query($sql);
$state = $ret->fetchArray(SQLITE3_ASSOC);
$output = (string)$state['status'];
if (strcmp($output, 'FINISHED') == 0) {
$loop = False;
}
echo $output;
$db->close();
}
If you want to get an output immediately and a kind of interface, I think The best solution for your problem might be to use HTTP long polling. This way, it will not hold the connection for hours if the job is not done:
you will need to code a javascript snippet (in another html or php page) that runs an ajax call to your current php code.
Your web server (and so, your php code) will keep the connection opened for a while until the job is done or a time limit is reached (say 20-30 seconds)
if the job is not done, the javascript will make another ajax call and everything will start again, keeping the connection, etc... until you get the expected output status...
BEWARE : this solution will not work on any hosting provider
You will need to set the max_execution_time to a higher value than the default one see php doc for this.
I think you can find many things on http long polling with php/javascript on google / stack overflow...

PHP: could not find database

i am having difficulty with connecting my database to mysql, i have tried many different ways of trying to get it to connect to my database, but none these methods seem to work. I am only new to php and i could be missing something, but i dont know what it is.
This is for a search engine, i have the form created.
I would think that my problem is coming from this line of code, mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "") or die("could not connect");?!
I was wondering if i could be told what is the problem and how to fix it, thank you so much.
here is my code below.
<?php
//connect
mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "") or die("could not connect");
mysql_select_db("search") or die("could not find database");
$output = '';
if (isset($_POST['search'])) {
$searchq = $_POST['search'];
$searchq = preg_replace("#[^0-9a-z]#i","", $searchq);
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM gp management system WHERE Title LIKE '%$searchq%' OR Description LIKE '%$searchq%' OR Keyword LIKE '%$searchq%'") or die("could not search");
$count = mysql_num_rows($query);
if($count == 0) {
$output = 'There was no search results!';
}
else{
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {
$Title = $row['Title'];
$Description = $row['Description'];
$Keyword = $row['Keyword'];
$output .= '<div> ' .$Keyword. ' </div> ';
}
}
}
?>
SQL errors:
SELECT * FROM gp management system WHERE Title...
^^-- table name
^^^^^^^^^^ aliasing 'gp' as 'management'
^^^^^^-- extra unknown garbage
Table names shouldn't have spaces to begin with, but if you insist on having them, then you need proper quoting:
SELECT * FROM `gp management system` etc...
^--------------------^
Never output a fixed/useless "could not search" error. Have the DB tell you what went wrong:
$result = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
As your only new, you really should stop using mysql_ and change to mysqli_ or (my preference) PDO(). Your message in your title seems to be coming from your selectdb line, so you're actually connecting to the database fine, it's just not able to locate the schema that you are trying to use (i.e. "search" does not exist as a schema name in your DB environment). Unless that's not the error that you are getting, in which case it's a flaw in your actual SQL query. Without an accurate statement of what you are getting back on the screen when you try to run the script then not much can be done to help.
I would rather do somehow like I did ages ago, see below:
function db_connect($host, $username, $passwd, $db_name) {
$db = mysql_connect($host, $username, $passwd);
if (!$db) {
echo "Login to database failed: ";
echo mysql_error();
return false;
}
$result=mysql_select_db($db_name); //Select the database
if (!$result) {
echo "Cannot find the database: ".$db_name;
echo mysql_error();
return false;
}
return $db; //Database descriptor
}
However you shouldnt rely on the old MYSQL extension, but use MYSQLi.
EDIT: as #tadman pointed out there were a # sign infront the mysql_connect call, however there is an if statement for checking and a call to error output.
As others have said, your code is something of a mess - you seem to be new to programming, not just in PHP. But everyone has to start somewhere, so....
You might want to start by learning a bit about how to ask questions - specifically you have included a lot of code which is not relevant to the problem you are asking about - which is about connecting to MySQL. OTOH you have omitted lots of important information like the operating system this is running on and what diagnostics you have attempted. See here for a better (though far from exemplary example).
Do read your question carefully - the title implies an issue with mysql_select_db() while in the body of the content you say you think the problerm is with mysql_connect(). If you had provided the actual output of the script we would have been able to tell for ourselves.
You should be checking that MySQL is actually running - how you do that depends on your OS. You should try connecting using a different client (the mysql command line client, sqldeveloper, Tora, PHPMyAdmin....there are lots to choose from).
You should also check (again this is operating system specific) that your MySQL instance is running on the same port as is configured in your php.ini (or overridden in your mysql_connect() call).
MySQL treats 'localhost' as something different from 127.0.0.1 on Unix/Linux systems. If this applies to you try 127.0.0.1 in place of localhost.
or die("could not connect");
Does not help in diagnosing the problem. If instead you...
or die(mysql_error());
You will get a more meaningful response.
BTW: while writing code using the mysql extension rather than mysqli or PDO is forgivable, I am somewhat alarmed to see what appears to be medical information managed with no real security.

How can I get php pdo code to keep retrying to connect if there are too many open connections?

I have an issue, it has only cropped up now. I am on a shared web hosting plan that has a maximum of 10 concurrent database connections. The web app has dozens of queries, some pdo, some mysql_*.
Loading one page in particular peaks at 5-6 concurrent connections meaning it takes a minimum of 2 users loading it at the same time to spit an error on one or both of them.
I know this is inefficient, I'm sure I can cut that down quite a bit, but that's what my idea is at the moment is to move the pdo code into a function and just pass in a query string and an array of variables, then have it return an array (partly to tidy my code).
THE ACTUAL QUESTION:
How can I get this function to continue to retry until it manages to execute, and hold up the script that called it (and any script that might have called that one) until it manages to execute and return it's data? I don't want things executing out of order, I am happy with code being delayed for a second or so during peak times
Since someone will ask for code, here's what I do at the moment. I have this in a file on it's own so I have a central place to change connection parameters. the if statement is merely to remove the need to continuously change the parameters when I switch from my test server to the liver server
$dbtype = "mysql";
$server_addr = $_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR'];
if ($server_addr == '192.168.1.10') {
$dbhost = "localhost";
} else {
$dbhost = "xxxxx.xxxxx.xxxxx.co.nz";
}
$dbname = "mydatabase";
$dbuser = "user";
$dbpass = "supersecretpassword";
I 'include' that file at the top of a function
include 'db_connection_params.php';
$pdo_conn = new PDO("mysql:host=$dbhost;dbname=$dbname", $dbuser, $dbpass);
then run commands like this all on the one connection
$sql = "select * from tbl_sub_cargo_cap where sub_model_sk = ?";
$capq = $pdo_conn->prepare($sql);
$capq->execute(array($sk_to_load));
while ($caprow = $capq->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) {
//stuff
}
You shouldn't need 5-6 concurrent connections for a single page, each page should only really ever use 1 connection. I'd try to re-architect whatever part of your application is causing multiple connections on a single page.
However, you should be able to catch a PDOException when the connection fails (documentation on connection management), and then retry some number of times.
A quick example,
<?php
$retries = 3;
while ($retries > 0)
{
try
{
$dbh = new PDO("mysql:host=localhost;dbname=blahblah", $user, $pass);
// Do query, etc.
$retries = 0;
}
catch (PDOException $e)
{
// Should probably check $e is a connection error, could be a query error!
echo "Something went wrong, retrying...";
$retries--;
usleep(500); // Wait 0.5s between retries.
}
}
10 concurrent connections is A LOT. It can serve 10-15 online users easily.
Heavy efforts needed to exhaust them.
So there is something wrong with your code.
There are 2 main reasons for it:
slow queries take too much time and thus serving one hit uses one mysql connection for too long.
multiple connections opened from every script.
The former one have to be investigated but for the latter one it's simple:
Do not mix myqsl_ and PDO in one script: you are opening 2 connections at a time.
When using PDO, open connection only once and then use it throughout your code.
Reducing the number of connections in one script is the only way to go.
If you have multiple instances of PDO class in your code, you will need to add that timeout handling code you want to every call. So, heavy code rewriting required anyway.
Replace these new instances with global $pdo; instead. It will take the same amount of time but it will be permanent solution, not temporary patch as you want it.
Please be sensible.
PHP automatically closes all the connections st the end of the script, you don't have to care about closing them manually.
Having only one connection throughout one script is a common practice. It is used by ALL the developers around the world. You can use it without any doubts. Just use it.
If you have transaction and want to log something in database you sometimes need 2 connections in one script

PDO let database stay open, or open and close when needed?

I have just discovered PDO and I'm very excited about it, but I have read a few tutorials on how to implement it, and they show me different ways of doing it.
So now I'm confused which way is the best.
example 1: open database once.
include("host.php"); //including the database connection
//random PDO mysql stuff here
Example 2: open close the database when needed:
try {
$dbh = new PDO(mysql stuff);
$sql = "mysql stuff";
foreach ($dbh->query($sql) as $row)
{
echo $row['something'];
}
/*** close the database connection ***/
$dbh = null;
}
catch(PDOException $e)
{
echo $e->getMessage();
}
Which is best? I would think example 2 is best, but there much more code than example 1.
Usually, there is significant time spent/lost when connecting, and you want to do it only once. Do not go closing a connection you need later on, it will only slow things down. You may consider closing a connection sooner if you are reaching the maximum connections limit, but that's more a hint you should scale up then a permanent solution IMHO.

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