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I was wondering why I had about 2000 TCP connections in state TIME_WAIT after upgrading from vB4 to XenForo 2. The reason was that XenForo didn't use persistent database connections. Since XenForo uses the PHP extension MySQLi, you can enable persistent connections between PHP and your MySQL server by prepending p: to the hostname (http://php.net/manual/en/mysqli.construct.php). I think this should be documented.
You are correct about the bad example, I just copy-pasted it from the manual and added p:. I think the general suggestion is still valid though (with an adjusted example).
Actually I wouldn't generally recommend persistent connections, though they do make sense in some cases - for example if XF is more or less the only application using the database server.