Question then: How do you omit the overhead of setting up a new socket and all of the SSL handshakes? I'm not concerned about the Java overhead associated with new connections, I'm concerned with the raw connectivity/handshake overhead required with new connections to the DB.
It happens once, on initialization. :) The first execution takes anywhere from 50-70 seconds, for sure, but reusing the connection afterwards means subsequent ones don't have to deal with it (100-200 ms a pop). (Does that make sense?)