I think you should read Hibernate3 Migration Guides from 3.0 step by step to 3.6 Sleep mode
And here's a quick hibernate changelog search for improvements and performance paths from 3.0 to 3.6
- [HHH-5823] - Poor multi-threaded performance in the UpdateTimestampsCache class
- [HHH-5824] - Poor multi-threaded performance in the SessionFactoryImpl.getQueryCache method.
- [HHH-3860] - Cascading performance issues when a session contains many objects
- [HHH-3357] - improves session.clear () performance
- [HHH-2553] - New implementation of LoadContexts, resulting in poor performance.
- [HHH-2957] - ActionQueue Sort insert worsens exponentially (Jay Erb)
- [HHH-2553] - New implementation of LoadContexts, resulting in poor performance.
- [HHH-2229] - HHH-1293, CGLIBLazyInitializer Java
- [HHH-2023] - JTATransactionFactory.isTransactionInProgress()
- [HHH-864] - QUERY_CACHE .
- [HHH-525] - cglib
Hibernate JIRA details.Good luck