Environment is Linux RedHat 7.2, Apache 1.3.23, PHP 4.1.2 DSO with OCI8 (8.1.7.0) and several other extensions; the Oracle database (8.1.7.3) is on a Win2k server. 

I have a script implementing session handling against Oracle that's included at the top of each and every page of an application.

I cannot share the transaction context with the application but want to create a single, persistent connection to the DB, so I use OCIPlogon('user1', 'pwd1', 'alias') in the included file, while the application connects with OCINlogon('user2', 'pwd2', 'alias').

If I query the v$session table for username,process,status I observe an ever growing number of INACTIVE 'user2' sessions for each process, and eventually Oracle complains for too many sessions.

I read "Making efficient use of Oracle8i thru Apache and PHP 4" thoroughly and believed I was following its advice:

"...so if you need to isolate transactions on one page you would use OCILogon() or OCIPLogon() for the "main" connection and create an additional connection using OCINLogon(). the OCINLogon() connection would be handled thru the same server-handle as the other connection but would have it's own session-handle. side-note: the session-handle created by OCINLogon() will always be freed at the end of the script..."

Looks like the above is not true when using OCIPLogon, but I think it should be.