quindi al refresh della pagina rimane l'handle della connessione?
non del tutto,
The second, and most popular, method is to run PHP as a module in a multiprocess web server, which currently only includes Apache. A multiprocess server typically has one process (the parent) which coordinates a set of processes (its children) who actually do the work of serving up web pages. When a request comes in from a client, it is handed off to one of the children that is not already serving another client. This means that when the same client makes a second request to the server, it may be served by a different child process than the first time. When opening a persistent connection, every following page requesting SQL services can reuse the same established connection to the SQL server.
in breve, si potrebbero aprire anche una decina di connessioni che poi verrebbero riutilizzate successivamente. non ti è dato sapere quale di queste connessioni ti capiterà.
sottolineo questa parte:
n particular, they do not give you an ability to open 'user sessions' on the same link, they do not give you an ability to build up a transaction efficiently, and they don't do a whole lot of other things. In fact, to be extremely clear about the subject, persistent connections don't give you any functionality that wasn't possible with their non-persistent brothers.
non utilizzatele.