I am currently trying to improve the performance of a Spring/Hibernate/MySQL web app. We are currently using Hibernate default pooling algorithm. What would be the main reason to move into another algorithm like c3p0?

I read in the documentation that the default algorithm is quite rudimentary. What does that exactly mean? How moving to c3p0 or another algorithm will improve the performance of my application?

Just look at the documentation of c3po or of another connection-pool implementation as
[url]http://people.apache.org/~fhanik/jdbc-pool/jdbc-pool.html
[/url] and you will understand what this pools all do implement.
The default pooling algorithm just provides just the minimal essential