Hibernate: What is the connection pool and why is the default one unsuitable for production?

Question

I\'m very unfamiliar with Hibernate and have just started working on a web app that uses it with a MySQL database. I notice that the community documentation tutorial states:

Answer 1

The default connection pool in hibernate is c3p0 named after the star wars character. But hibernate supports also proxool and used to also advertise apache dbcp. For a while DBCP was dormant and fell out of grace.

C3P0 is actually used in production in many projects. Although it is sometimes found to behave poorly at peak time. There are several alternatives. Like for instance the new connection pool included in Tomcat 7. I haven't tested it yet though, but heard some positive feedbacks about it.