Miha Nedok from http://www.izklop.com wrote us a few days ago about their mysqlnd test run:
I wish I had another production box to test. But what we and our users see now, actually the users notified our team that the site is suddenly “always loading fast”.. The only change… you guessed it mysqlnd installed. It wasn’t slow before, but people noticed performance degradation at times that the site is most visited when libmysql was used.
Hick-ups solved
After a little hick-up during the first days the server is now
running stable with ext/mysql @ mysqlnd. Immediately after the
installation of mysqlnd, Miha noticed that persistent connections
got closed because of a low …