Effect of Limiting Persistent Connections

I read over the persistent connections section of the manual and found a few things I would like clarified. I see that for each Apache child, a persistent connection will be opened (at least thats my interpretation of it). However, if the database only has 2 connections left open (others are in use) that can be used by my application, what effect will limiting the max_persistent to '2' have. For instance, say there are 10 children for apache running. If only 2 connections are allowed, how will this effect the child processes? Does apache need to be set then to only allow 2 'servers' to start, or will they all use those 2 persistent connections? If the 2 connections are busy and my script attempts to execute a query, will it be refused, or will it wait for the connection to open. All queries should be considerably fast and finish within a second (at the absolute longest). Thanks for the info. Joe