c3p0 hangs in awaitAvailable with hibernate

does this happen immediately, or after a while? that is, do checkouts initially succeed, but then hang like this? if so, it looks like a Connection leak. please try setting c3p0 params unreturnedConnectionTimeout and debugUnreturnedConnectionStackTraces to see if there is a leak. See http://www.mchange.com/projects/c3p0/#configuring_to_debug_and_workaround_broken_clients , http://www.mchange.com/projects/c3p0/#unreturnedConnectionTimeout , http://www.mchange.com/projects/c3p0/#debugUnreturnedConnectionStackTraces .

if this happens immediately, if no Connections are successfully checked out, the question is whether the pool ever succeeds at acquiring Connections. by default, if it never does succeed, after about 30 seconds your thread should break with a failure. (it doesn't look like you've done this, but if for example you'd set acquireRetryAttempts to zero, c3p0 might hang indefinitely waiting for Connections.)

to debug c3p0 issues, it's helpful to capture the version and config information that c3p0 dumps to logs at INFO level on pool initialization.

good luck!

Also, you haven't seem to initialize the checkoutTime parameter for c3p0, which specifies the amount of time a client should wait for acquiring a connection from the connection pool.

see http://www.mchange.com/projects/c3p0/#checkoutTimeout