What's the proper way to handle JDBC connections with Spring and DBCP?

As you already found out, the default dbcp connection pool is 8 connections, so if you want to run 9 simultaneous queries one of them will be blocked. I suggest you connect to your database and run exec sp_who2 which will show you what is connected, and active, and whether any queries are being blocked. You can then confirm whether the issue is on the db or in your code.

DBCP maxWait parameter should be defined in milliseconds. 30 ms is very low value, consider increasing it to 30000 ms and try again.

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