informix persistent connections

I'm working on a rather large community site with about a quarter million users and a database of about a half-million items of user generated content (bulleting boards, articles, links...). We are running the following configuration: -Redundant webservers running Solaris or Linux and php 4.01 -Redundant replicated database servers running Informix 9.02 on Solaris -Connections to both the webservers and the database servers are load balanced using a Foundry Networks loadbalancer. Everything is running fine, but we cannot get informix persistent connections to work properly. Here is the problem. The persistent db connections are made between the apache children and the load balancer. The load balancer handles the db connections from php and proxies them to the database farm, the proxied connections are maintained in a state table. After a certain amount of inactivity (in the evenings and early morning hours), the loadbalancer will kill off the connections and remove them from the state table. However the apache children, which only die off after a certain amount of activity, still think there is a persistent connection. So php starts to serve a page, thinks it connects to the database and then starts spilling errors when we pass queries. I can catch the error in the connection, but I cannot disconnect and re-establish the connection. The ifx_close only works for non-persistent connections (which we have been forced to use for now, but we lose .5 seconds on a page load). Any ideas on how to deal with this? The only solution I have is to catch the error and to redirect to the same page in order to get a new apache child, but this is risky because there is no guarantee that one has a valid connection either. Any help would be appreciated - Thanks. cory