Oracle Persistant Connections

Good Day all, A question about persistent connections. I am using Oracle8i and want to make a little php script that will be run a huge amount of times (i hope <g>). PHP has the OCIPLogon for persistent connections and am wondering the details of how it works. I want the php script to run a simple insert then select statement and would like to avoid a huge logon penalty that comes with creating a new session to oracle since the life of the program is very short and the frequency very very high (again I hope). Any input would be very helpful. Thanks, Serge.