EclipseLink connection pool exhausted: application freezes

Question

We have a standalone application with EclipseLink's default connection pool behaviour (max connection pool size 32). If the pool is exhausted (32 connections in transactional use) than the next request for a connection freezes the application (the request for the connection is on the event queue thread).

There is a property wait documented as Amount of time (in milliseconds) to wait for a connection from the pool. According to the code in

org.eclipse.persistence.sessions.server.ConnectionPool.acquireConnection()

it is the time a thread sleeps in the loop before it retries to acquire a connection from the pool. There seems to be no way either to limit the number of trials nor to get out of the loop unless another thread releases a connection or interrupts the current thread.

How can we avoid this?

We are using EclipseLink 2.7.7.