C# - Managing EntityConnection Lifetime?

There have been many question on managing EntityContext lifetime, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/813457/instantiating-a-context-in-linq-to-entitiesI've come to the conclusion that the entity context should be considered a unit-of-work and therefore not reused. But while doing some research for speeding up my database access, I ran into this blog post...Improving Entity Framework PerformanceThe post argues that EFs poor performance compared to other frameworks is often due to the EntityConnection object being created each time a new EntityContext object is needed.

To test this I manually created a static EntityConnection in Global.asax.cs Application_Start().
I then converted all my context using statements to
using( MyObjContext currContext = new MyObjeContext(globalStaticEFConnection)
{
....
}

This seems to have sped things up a bit without any errors so far as far as I can tell.But is this safe?Does using a applicationwide static EntityConnection introduce race conditions?