Christopher Jones – PHP OCI8 Signal Handling and –enable-sigchild:
„Only if you see defunct „zombie“ Oracle server processes then start PHP/Apache with the Oracle Net option BEQUEATH_DETACH=YES in your sqlnet.ora, or, to keep the setting specific to PHP, set your environment starting Apache.
[…] You should never need to configure PHP with –enable-sigchild or set BEQUEATH_DETACH=YES if PHP is „remote“ from the DB server.“