C3P0 - is a connection pool,  connection pool is a cache of database connections maintained, so that the connections can be reused when future requests to the database are required. 


The main question is how to cofigure it, because default values are not perfect. First of all I found oficial doc with description of the values. Next I found this one C3P0 ConnectionPool Configuration Rules of Thumb. After some perfomance testing of my application, I can confirm that cofiguring like in this article, can greatly increase your performance, in my case it was abouth twisly.
References:Download C3P0