spring - Spring BasicDataSource pool to perform WHEN_EXHAUSTED_GROW behaviour

Question

When uploaded our application on prod server we faced strange behaviour - sometimes it stopped to get data from data base as though the logic and everything was right and local version was working perfect. After remote debugging we found that GenericObjectPool was blocking thread. And after some time spent on searching we found situation that fits our problem. The pool just got exhausted when filled with 8 connections (default value) and by default it's behaviour is set to block thread when exhausted.

Here is my datamodel-context.xml config of BasicDataSource

<bean id="dataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource" destroy-method="close">
        <property name="driverClassName" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"/>
        <property name="url" value="url_to_db"/>
        <property name="username" value="username"/>
        <property name="password" value="12211"/>
        <property name="defaultAutoCommit" value="false"/>
        <property name="poolPreparedStatements" value="true"/>
        <property name="initialSize" value="10"/>
        <property name="maxIdle" value="5"/>
        <property name="testOnBorrow" value="true"/>
        <property name="logAbandoned" value="true"/>
    </bean>

Found here two solutions - increase max active number or change pool's behaviour. The first one seems to be simple - set property maxActive in BasicDataSource to some number (please correct me if I am mistaking). This way is unwanted because we can not know the exact number of possible simultanious connections.

It was decided to try the second way - to change behaviour to WHEN_EXHAUSTED_GROW. So is there any way to configure spring default pool to change it's whenExhaustedAction behaviour? Or should I define my own connection pool for BasicDataSource? If so, please can you provide examples? I appreciate any comments or advices. Thanks.