New Connection pooling => Apache Connects Maxing out ?

Hello,

With some great help from this list the other night I implemented connection
pooling on Tomcat using the commons-dbcp package.

I am using Tomcat 4.0.4

That seemed to work fine and there are no problems in testing but as soon as
I put it live the number of Apache processes rockets through the roof and
apache stops accepting connections.

The log file says "MaxClients" reached. This was no problem as MaxClients
was set to 20 which was fine with the old (non connection pooling) .war
file. So I set up MaxClients to 256 and restarted, now the problem happens
again.

Why does TOMCAT connection pooling require my Apache web server to make more
connections to the client???????

This is causing a total site outage as I cannot replicate the problem in any
test environment so it is URGENT!! Please Please help.

Kind regards,

Andoni.