In accordance with an embodiment, described herein is a system and method for use of a non-blocking process with a resource pool, for example a connection pool, or another type of computing environment. A generic wait-free approach can be used with a variety of different types of resource pools and pool elements. Threads which require access to a collection of resources do not have to wait for a lock on that collection of resources to become available. Although a borrowing thread may still be required to wait for a particular resource to be released, the wait-free approach allows the thread to browse through a list of available resources. The approach can be used with connection pools, or with other types of computing environments, to provide improved scalability in such systems.