Throttling Oracle on PHP side

[WebHorn]

I need to contrain my PHP db connections to oracle on the PHP side (the DBA in my case can't set a ceiling for my connections becuase of some obscure bug in Oracle that will mess up other users limits). Since this is going to be an Internet facing application he requested that I throttle my own connections with PHP.

Has anyone done this? Looking at the Oracle calls in the PHP documentation there's nothing I could find that would lend itself to this and no php.ini settings either.

Yes, I know that this is something better on the DB side but can it be done. Also, what approaches have you taken in your scripts to prevent a malicious user from flooding your connection?

[WebHorn]

ttt...anyone?

[Sxooter]

I'll assume you're running PHP on apache1.3.x/Unix. If not, then this may or may not apply.

Under apache, you can limit the maximum number of children it can spawn.

If you then limit the number of connections you make to one per script in PHP, then the max number of connections you'll be using will be the max number of apache children you can spawn.

also, don't use persistant connects. they tend to cause as many problems as they solve, and should only ever be used when it is clear that THEY are the answer to a particular problem, and the machines running apache and oracle have LOTS of memory.