... most accurate and descriptive term for what they do. Similar packages to APC that are available are ionCube PHP Accelerator, eAccelerator and Zend Cache. Your choice of cache, I will leave up ... files.Prepared StatementsWhile database-specific escape functions are useful, not all databases provide such a feature. In fact, database-specific escape functions are relatively rare. (At the moment) ... make a database connection persistent, which allows the database handle to remain valid even after the script is terminated. If a connection is persistent, each subsequent connection request...