Suse 8.2, Linux2.4.20 performance problems?

[Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com>]

So a couple months ago I upgraded my old dev box from Suse6 to Suse8.2, 
from kernel 2.2.25 to 2.4.20. I didn't do much with it after that 
because I'm doing most of my work on a newer system running Suse 9.1. 
But anyway, on the Suse8.2 system, I now find that test008, which used 
to run in under 30 seconds on Suse6, now takes about 72 minutes. It 
seems that once slapd spawns more than about 10 threads the performance 
slows to a crawl. Even my "top" which normally refreshes once every 5 
seconds slows down to refreshing once every few minutes, and "ps" and 
"uptime" all hang as well.

So... A bit of googling didn't turn up anything relevant. Has anyone 
else seen anything like this?

--
 -- Howard Chu
 Chief Architect, Symas Corp.       Director, Highland Sun
 http://www.symas.com               http://highlandsun.com/hyc
 Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support