Had exactly the same problem with Spring 3.1, Webflow 3.1 and Hibernate 4.1.4. Tried commons dbcp and c3p0. The connection pool was always running out of connections.
My Solution: I changed to tomcat-jdbc (org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.DataSource) and now everything works just fine!
Had exactly the same problem with Spring 3.1, Webflow 3.1 and Hibernate 4.1.4. Tried commons dbcp and c3p0. The connection pool was always running out of connections.
My Solution: I changed to tomcat-jdbc (org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.DataSource) and now everything works just fine!