perplexing performance on AIX

I have been working with an AIX LPAR which has access to 6 CPU's, defaults to 3. Its primarily a data warehouse instance, so we enabled parallel on it and about half of the tables are large, and are range-partitioned on by year, and in some cases sub-partitioned on accounting period (list method).

There is plenty of memory (32G), and its on an EMC Clariion storage. However, when we run loads using merge, and in some cases, some very large queries, the queries run for days at a time, but the CPU usage is not all that high (rarely above about 60%).

The AWR report (its oracle 10.2.0.3) shows a huge number of wait events on PX Dequeue Credit: Send Blkd. According to the oracle documentation, this is an idle event, but it appears to me that about 2/3 of the available time is spent waiting on this event. Has anyone seen this, or have any idea how to track down what is causing the problem? There are also a large number of IO wait events, but the time is not significant compared to the PX wait event. Is it possible that PX wait event is caused by the IO wait event? If so, how could I track it down?

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