GFS2 much slower than ext3 for creating Oracle forms and reports on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Solution Unverified - Updated 2013-07-04T09:16:38+00:00 -

Issue

I have a 4-node cluster (physical server) with a GFS file system. When running jobs to compile Oracle forms and reports, it is terribly slow when compared to our test server (single VM machine).
- I then proceed to test the performance of the GFS cluster by removing 3-nodes from the cluster and mount the single node GFS filesystems with lock_nolock in addition to the existing option - noatime and nodiratime.
- Mounting with lock_nolock proves to be a lot faster as compared to running with all 4-nodes.
- What can be done here to improve the performance of the GFS filesystem?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 (with Resilient Storage Add Ons)
Red Hat High Availability cluster with 2 or more nodes
GFS2 filesystem mounted on all cluster nodes
- GFS2 filesystems are mounted with defaults,noatime,nodiratime,acl,quota=off
- There is no entry for plock_rate_limit in /etc/cluster/cluster.conf, so the default of 100 plocks-per-second is used.
Workload consists of Oracle Application AD Administration (Version 12.0.0)
- This application makes extensive use of Posix locks (plocks).

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