So, to summarize, to get a connection to ???work??? (which I define as including handling dropped connections by reconnecting without error): In ???hibernate.cfg.xml???: <!-- hibernate.cfg.xml --><property name=c3p0.min_size>5</property><property name=c3p0.max_size>20</property><property name=c3p0.timeout>1800</property><property name=c3p0.max_st