This performance is JDBC driver specific. The C3P0 connection pool should not have any influence on it. I would suggest to retest it with a newer or another JDBC driver.
An alternative to the Sybase driver is the jTDS driver . I am not sure how this performs compared to the Sybase driver, but it is known to be very performant as compared to Microsoft's own MSSQL JDBC driver.
On a semi-related note, check out Apache Commons DbUtils and the Dbutils.closeQuietly() method for easily managing closing of connections/statements/resultsets in the correct order with correct exception handling.
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