Re:The difference for me... (Score 1)

First of all you don't want to close the connection because you want to the user to see page you are generating. You can do database writes after the client disconnects. That is what he wanted to do.
Second you can leave instances running as long as you wish: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-lim it.php. That requires tweaking of httpd.conf though.