MySQL: Using giant number of connections
What are dangers of frequent connects ?
It works well, with exception of some extreme cases. If you get hundreds of connects per second from the same box you may get into running out of local port numbers. The way to fix it could be - decrease "/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_fin_timeout" on linux (this breaks TCP/IP standard but you might not care in your local network), increase "/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range" on the client. Other OS have similar settings. You also may use more web boxes or multiple IP for your same database host to work around this problem. I've realy seen this in production.
Some background about this problem:
TCP/IP connection is identified by localip:localport remoteip:remote port. We have MySQL IP and Port as well as client IP fixed in this case so we can only vary local port which has finite range. Note even after you close connection TCP/IP stack has to keep the port reserved for some time, this is where tcp_fin_timeout comes from.