Slowness observed in obtaining connection using neo4j java jdbc driver

Hi All,

I have my java application deployed in websphere application server. I am successfully able to connect to neo4j from my java application using jdbc driver. But there are some performance issues with the approach i have followed. Currently neo4j server is running on Xms - 8G and Xmx-16GB. I have only less amount of data that is aprox 40mb with 3100 nodes. When we test the performance over http with cypher, the performance is outstanding. But in our case we are using the jdbc driver in the application to connect to neo4j via bolt. Every connection creation is taking around 100ms which is adding up delay. We are able to achieve only 160 hits/sec with this approach. With 500 concurrent calls, the requests are queuing up and the response time is shooting to 3 seconds. Any pointers of improvement would be helpful. (Application server and neo4j servers are on different boxes under the same VLAN).

Below is the snippet of connection creation.
Class.forName("org.neo4j.jdbc.Driver").newInstance();
Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:neo4j:bolt://localhost:port") ;