I'm accessing an Oracle 10g database from within PHP 5.0. I can do this successfully as long as I use the oci_new_connect() function. I suspect (but don't really know for sure) that it's not efficient to always force a new connection. If I try to use oci_connect(), I can connect about three times, after that PHP will hang and timeout on the oci_connect() line. I then won't be able to connect using either function until I reboot my development computer. I always implicitly close the connection with oci_close(), so that's not the issue.

So I have two questions:
1) Is it in fact inefficient to always use oci_new_connect()?
2) If so, what do I have to do to make oci_connect() work consistently?