Note that on all >=Windows 7 Servers, a host name "localhost" will create a very expensive lookup (~1 Second). 

That's because since Windows 7, the hosts file doesn't come with a preconfigured
127.0.0.1 localhost
anymore

So, if you notice a long connection creation, try "127.0.0.1" instead.

Please do use set_charset("utf8") after establishing the connection if you want to avoid weird string issues. I do not know why the documentation does not warn you about this kind of stuff.

We had a hard time figuring out what was going on since we were using mb_detect_encoding and it said everything was UTF-8, but of course the display was wrong. If we used iconv from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 the strings looked fine, even though everything in the database had the right collation. So in the end, it was the connection that was the filter and although the notes for this function mention default charsets, it almost reads as a sidenote instead of a central issue when dealing with UTF and PHP/MySQL.

There's a separate port parameter, unlike mysql_connect. However, using host:port on the host parameter does actually work.

There is a caveat. If the host is 'localhost' then the port is ignored, whether you use a port parameter or the implicit syntax I mentioned above. This is because 'localhost' will make it use unix sockets rather than TCP/IP.

Just wanted to add a note for anyone looking to use the MySQLi persistent connections feature; it's important to note that PHP opens and retains one connection per database user per process.

What this means is that if you are hosting multiple applications, each with its own database user (as is good practice) then you will end up multiplying the number of connections that PHP may hold open.

For example, if you have PHP configured with a maximum of eight worker processes, and you regularly use four different database users, then your MySQL server will need to accept at LEAST a maximum of 32 connections, or else it will run out.

However, if you would like to minimise the number of connections, what you can do is instead is to open the connection using a "guest" user (with no privileges except logging in) and then use ->change_user() to switch to a more privileged user, before switching back to the guest when you're done. Since all of the connections would therefore belong to the guest user, PHP should only maintain one per worker process.

If you want to connect via an alternate port (other than 3306), as you might when using an ssh tunnel to another host, using "localhost" as the hostname will not work. 

Using 127.0.0.1 will work.  Apparently, if you specify the host as "localhost", the constructor ignores the port specified as an argument to the constructor.