Ah great! This is definitely something we want :)

How long have you tested this?
How confident are you about the stability of this?
I'm asking because we're close to releasing v6 stable and it's a delicate time to introduce important changes ;)

Thanks!

I've been using it on my local server for a couple months. Reading and writing posts and comments, changing settings, etc. work just fine. I was assuming you'd want to put this in the i8 branch, but if you want it for v6, I suppose you could create a new branch, pull this into the new branch, and do whatever testing needs to be done before merging it with master.

In general, this was just replacing mysql_ with mysqli_ and MYSQL_ with MYSQLI_. The other two man things were:

1. The database handle goes as the first argument instead of the last in the mysqli_* functions.
2. The database handle is an object instead of a resource ($obj = mysqli_connect(...) and $obj = mysqli_init() are just procedural wrappers around $obj = new mysqli(...) and $obj = mysqli::init()). This meant changing checks of is_resource() to is_object().

I suppose mysqli_kill() couldn't hurt. I wasn't familiar with it. The original DB class didn't close the MySQL connections at all. I suppose that was part of the limitation of the PHP 4-style classes that didn't allow destructors. I added mysql_close() hoping that that would reduce the frequency of exceeding the maximum database connections and I just changed that to mysqli_close() in the mysqli conversion. It would probably be best to only use mysqli_kill() for non-persistent connections. IIRC, mysqli_close() only reduces the reference count of persistent connections.