Connection pooling options with JDBC: DBCP vs C3P0

I was having trouble with DBCP when the connections times out so I trialled c3p0. I was going to release this to production but then started performance testing. I found that c3p0 performed terribly. I couldn't configure it to perform well at all. I found it twice as slow as DBCP.

I then tried the Tomcat connection pooling.

This was twice as fast as c3p0 and fixed other issues I was having with DBCP. I spent a lot of time investigating and testing the 3 pools. My advice if you are deploying to Tomcat is to use the new Tomcat JDBC pool.

For the auto-reconnect issue with DBCP, has any tried using the following 2 configuration parameters?

validationQuery="Some Query"

testOnBorrow=true

DBCP is out of date and not production grade. Some time back we conducted an in-house analysis of the two, creating a test fixture which generated load and concurrency against the two to assess their suitability under real life conditions.

DBCP consistently generated exceptions into our test application and struggled to reach levels of performance which C3P0 was more than capable of handling without any exceptions.

C3P0 also robustly handled DB disconnects and transparent reconnects on resume whereas DBCP never recovered connections if the link was taken out from beneath it. Worse still DBCP was returning Connection objects to the application for which the underlying transport had broken.

Since then we have used C3P0 in 4 major heavy-load consumer web apps and have never looked back.

UPDATE: It turns out that after many years of sitting on a shelf, the Apache Commons folk have taken DBCP out of dormancy and it is now, once again, an actively developed project. Thus my original post may be out of date.

That being said, I haven't yet experienced this new upgraded library's performance, nor heard of it being de-facto in any recent app framework, yet.

I invite you to try out BoneCP -- it's free, open source, and faster than the available alternatives (see benchmark section).

Disclaimer: I'm the author so you could say I'm biased :-)

UPDATE: As of March 2010, still around 35% faster than the new rewritten Apache DBCP ("tomcat jdbc") pool. See dynamic benchmark link in benchmark section.

Update #2: (Dec '13) After 4 years at the top, there's now a much faster competitor : https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP

Update #3: (Sep '14) Please consider BoneCP to be deprecated at this point, recommend switching to HikariCP.

Update #4: (April '15) -- I no longer own the domain jolbox.com