HikariCP ^{It's Faster.} 

There is nothing faster.¹ There is nothing more correct. HikariCP is a "zero-overhead" production-quality connection pool.

Using a stub-JDBC implementation to isolate and measure the overhead of HikariCP, 60+ Million JDBC operations were performed in 8ms on a commodity PC.² The next fastest connection pool (BoneCP) was 5298ms.

Pool	Med (ms)	Avg (ms)	Max (ms)
BoneCP	5298	3249	6929
HikariCP	8	7	13

_{¹We contend HikariCP is near the theoretical maximum on current JVM technology.
²400 threads, 50 connection pool. Measurements in nanoseconds and converted to milliseconds. See benchmarks here. See how we do it here.}

Or look at this:

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Configuration (knobs, baby!)

The following are the various properties that can be configured in the pool, their behavior, and their defaults. HikariCP uses milliseconds for all time values, be careful.

Rather than coming out of the box with almost nothing configured, HikariCP comes with sane defaults that let a great many deployments run without any additional tweaking (except for the DataSource and DataSource properties).

acquireIncrement
This property controls the maximum number of connections that are acquired at one time, with the exception of pool initialization. Default: 5

acquireRetries
This is a per-connection attempt retry count used during new connection creation (acquisition). If a connection creation attempt fails there will be a wait of acquireRetryDelay milliseconds followed by another attempt, up to the number of retries configured by this property. Default: 3

acquireRetryDelay
This property controls the number of milliseconds to delay between attempts to acquire a connection to the database. If acquireRetries is 0, this property has no effect. Default: 750

connectionTestQuery
This is for "legacy" databases that do not support the JDBC4 Connection.isValid() API. This is the query that will be executed just before a connection is given to you from the pool to validate that the connection to the database is still alive. It is database dependent and should be a query that takes very little processing by the database (eg. "VALUES 1"). See the jdbc4ConnectionTest property for a more efficent alive test. One of either this property or jdbc4ConnectionTest must be specified. Default: none

connectionTimeout
This property controls the maximum number of milliseconds that a client (that's you) will wait for a connection from the pool. If this time is exceeded without a connection becoming available, an SQLException will be thrown. Default: 5000

dataSourceClassName
This is the name of the DataSource class provided by the JDBC driver. Consult the documentation for your specific JDBC driver to get this class name. Note XA data sources are not supported. XA requires a real transaction manager like bitronix. Default: none

idleTimeout
This property controls the maximum amount of time (in milliseconds) that a connection is allowed to sit idle in the pool. Whether a connection is retired as idle or not is subject to a maximum variation of +30 seconds, and average variation of +15 seconds. A connection will never be retired as idle before this timeout. A value of 0 means that idle connections are never removed from the pool. Default: 600000 (10 minutes)

jdbc4ConnectionTest
This property is a boolean value that determines whether the JDBC4 Connection.isValid() method is used to check that a connection is still alive. This value is mutually exlusive with the connectionTestQuery property, and this method of testing connection validity should be preferred if supported by the JDBC driver. Default: true

leakDetectionThreshold
This property controls the amount of time that a connection can be out of the pool before a message is logged indicating a possible connection leak. A value of 0 means leak detection is disabled. While the default is 0, and other connection pool implementations state that leak detection is "not for production" as it imposes a high overhead, at least in the case of HikariCP the imposed overhead is only 5μs (microseconds) split between getConnection() and close(). Maybe other pools are doing it wrong, but feel free to use leak detection under HikariCP in production environments if you wish. Default: 0

maxLifetime
This property controls the maximum lifetime of a connection in the pool. When a connection reaches this timeout, even if recently used, it will be retired from the pool. An in-use connection will never be retired, only when it is idle will it be removed. We strongly recommend setting this value, and using something reasonable like 30 minutes or 1 hour. A value of 0 indicates no maximum lifetime (infinite lifetime), subject of course to the idleTimeout setting. Default: 1800000 (30 minutes)

maximumPoolSize
This property controls the maximum size that the pool is allowed to reach, including both idle and in-use connections. Basically this value will determine the maximum number of actual connections to the database backend. A reasonable value for this is best determined by your execution environment. When the pool reaches this size, and no idle connections are available, calls to getConnection() will block for up to connectionTimeout milliseconds before timing out. Default: 60

minimumPoolSize
This property controls the minimum number of connections that HikariCP tries to maintain in the pool, including both idle and in-use connections. If the connections dip below this value, HikariCP will make a best effort to restore them quickly and efficiently. A reasonable value for this is best determined by your execution environment. Default: 10

poolName
This property represents a user-defined name for the connection pool and appears mainly in a JMX management console to identify pools and pool configurations. Default: auto-generated

DataSource Properties

DataSource properies can be set on the HikariConfig object through the use of the addDataSourcePropery method, like so:

config.addDataSourceProperty("url", "jdbc:hsqldb:mem:test");
config.addDataSourceProperty("user", "SA");
config.addDataSourceProperty("password", "");

Missing Knobs

HikariCP has plenty of "knobs" to turn as you can see above, but comparatively less than some other pools. This is a design philosophy. The HikariCP design asthetic is Minimalism.

We're not going to (overly) question the design decisions of other pools, but we will say that some other pools seem to implement a lot of "gimmicks" that proportedly improve performance. HikariCP achieves high-performance even in pools beyond realistic deployment sizes. Either these "gimmicks" are a case of premature optimization, poor design, or lack of understanding of how to leaverage what the JVM JIT can do to full effect.

In keeping with the simple is better or less is more design philosophy, some knobs and features are intentionally left out. Here are two, and the rationale.

Statement Cache
Most major database JDBC drivers already have a Statement cache that can be configured (Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Derby, etc). A statement cache in the pool would add unneeded weight and no additional functionality. It is simply unnecessary with modern database drivers to implement a cache at the pool level.

Log Statement Text / Slow Query Logging
Like Statement caching, most major database vendors support statement logging through properties of their own driver. This includes Oracle, MySQL, Derby, MSSQL, and others. We consider this a "development-time" feature. For those few databases that do not support it, jdbcdslog-exp is a good option. It is easy to wrap HikariCP arould jdbcdslog. It also provides some nice additional stuff like timing, logging slow queries only, and PreparedStatement bound parameter logging. Great stuff during development and pre-Production.

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Initialization

HikariConfig config = new HikariConfig();
config.setMaximumPoolSize(100);
config.setDataSourceClassName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");
config.addDataSourceProperty("url", "jdbc:mysql://localhost/database");
config.addDataSourceProperty("user", "bart");
config.addDataSourceProperty("password", "51mp50n");

HikariDataSource ds = new HikariDataSource(config);

or property file based:

HikariConfig config = new HikariConfig("some/path/hikari.properties");
HikariDataSource ds = new HikariDataSource(config);

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JMX Management

The following properties are configurable in real-time as the pool is running via a JMX management console such as JConsole:

• acquireIncrement
• acquireRetries
• acquireRetryDelay
• connectionTimeout
• idleTimeout
• leakDetectionThreshold
• maxLifetime
• minimumPoolSize
• maximumPoolSize

Support

Google discussion group HikariCP here

Requirements

• Oracle Java 7 and above¹
• Javassist 3.18.1+ library
• slf4j library

¹It might work with other JVM, but defintely won't work with Java 6 and below because of the use of classes that are only available in Java 7.