2.6 kernel is slow as compared to 3.10 kernel

Issue

1) Testing performance of a 2.6 kernel (RHEL-6.7) kernel and 3.10 kernel (unsupported kernel from elrepo.org).

2) Please see below for testing programs (Java and C) where running the test on a to a 3.10 kernel (elrepo.org) it takes about 1.5 seconds to create +/- 32,000 threads while on RedHat 6.7 with the default kernel 2.6 it takes more than 40 seconds.

To compile and run:

# javac ThreadTest.java
# java ThreadTest 

# gcc -pthread -lpthread threadtest.c -o threads_c
# chmod 755 threads_c ;  ./threads_c


----BEGIN JAVA  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
public class ThreadTest {
   public static void main(String[] pArgs) throws Exception {
      try {
         // keep spawning new threads forever
         while (true) {
            new TestThread().start();
         }
      }
      // when out of memory error is reached, print out the number of
      // successful threads spawned and exit
      catch ( OutOfMemoryError e ) {
         System.out.println("Threads created " + TestThread.CREATE_COUNT);
         System.exit(-1);
      }
   }
   static class TestThread extends Thread {
      private static int CREATE_COUNT = 0;
      public TestThread() {
         CREATE_COUNT++;
      }
      // make the thread wait for eternity after being spawned
      public void run() {
         try {
            sleep(Integer.MAX_VALUE);
         }
         // even if there is an interruption, dont do anything
         catch (InterruptedException e) {
         }
      }
   }
}

----END JAVA -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


----BEGIN C  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#include <stdio.h>
#include <pthread.h>
#include <unistd.h>
void *keep_busy(void *);
int main()
{
   int result, i = 0;
   pthread_t thread_id;
   while ((result = pthread_create( &thread_id, NULL, keep_busy, NULL)) == 0) {
        printf ("Create thread %10d\r", ++i);
   }
   return result;
}
void *keep_busy(void *dummyPtr)
{
   while (1) {
      sleep(1);
   }
}
----END C  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3) From a attached perf tool output its clearly visible that find_vma is eating the CPU in 2.6 kernel.