Limiting # of connections to remote Oracle

Greetings all, We are having serious issues with PHP4.0.5 using OCI8 and Apache 1.3.17. We have 4 webservers that handle our various needs for oracle. Each server has its MaxSpareServers in the httpd.conf set to 100. So that turns out to be 400 connections to the Oracle database. We are not using persistent connections, because that makes the problem worse. Does anyone know of a way to limit the number of database connections without having to turn away users by limiting the number of apache processes? We are using php+apache+oci8 to subscribe and unsubscribe people to our mailing list. We have simple select and update queries using non-persistent connections. Im not too sure what other information I would need to provide, Im just a webdeveloper, not a sysadmin, so please bear that in mind :) Thanks for any help you can give me. Larry Osborn Web Developer Napster, Inc.