OEL4 slowness on VMWare

Hi List,  

Has anyone else noticed major performance issues running OEL4 on VMWare? We're running both OEL5 (64-bit) and OEL4 (32-bit) on the same VMWare ESX 3.5 server, and performance for OEL5 is great, while OEL4 is terrible (see details below). We also tried the latest OEL4 update 7, but it wasn't any better either. We're going to test 64-bit OEL4 next to see if it's any better, but I'm just curious if anyone else has seen this and has any idea what the problem is? I've searched all over the Internet, metalink, vmware support, etc. and found nothing so far.  

Thanks,

Brandon  

OEL4 (32bit):  

->cat /etc/issue

Enterprise Linux Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (October Update 6)  

->uname -a

Linux 2.6.9-67.0.0.0.1.ELhugemem #1 SMP Sun Nov 18 00:31:12 EST 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux  

->sudo /sbin/hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb (repeated 3 times)

 Timing cached reads: 732 MB in 1.99 seconds = 368.27 MB/sec

 Timing buffered disk reads: 154 MB in 3.00 seconds = 51.27 MB/sec  

->date;dd if=/dev/zero of=/u01/oracle/test.dbf bs=8k count=524288;date

Tue Sep 2 15:20:30 MST 2008

524288+0 records in

524288+0 records out

Tue Sep 2 15:23:14 MST 2008  

4096/164=25MB/sec  

OEL5 (64bit):  

->cat /etc/issue

Enterprise Linux Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2 (Carthage)  

->uname -a

Linux 2.6.18-92.el5 #1 SMP Fri May 23 23:40:43 EDT 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux  

->sudo /sbin/hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb

 Timing cached reads: 21888 MB in 1.99 seconds = 11004.81 MB/sec

 Timing buffered disk reads: 250 MB in 3.01 seconds = 82.94 MB/sec  

->date;dd if=/dev/zero of=/u01/oracle/test.dbf bs=8k count=524288;date

Tue Sep 2 15:34:14 MST 2008

524288+0 records in

524288+0 records out

Tue Sep 2 15:34:44 MST 2008  

4096/30=137MB/sec  

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