It doesn't sound like you're looping per se; it sounds like everything is working, just slower than you expected. So: "Why is my installation of OpenLDAP running slower than I'd like it to?"
> Going back to a RedHat Linux 7 system, again with 4.2.52, which I > typically use to check out new releases, I ran some tests: "RedHat Linux 7" sounds kind of old, but I might be wrong, as I haven't used Red Hat in a while. I'd make sure my kernel and glibc are up to date, just in case OpenLDAP 2.3.14 is exacerbating some unfortunate scheduler/pthreads/whatever bug. i.e., your RHAS4 setup (updated) sounds more reasonable than RH7 if you're going to be submitting bugs against it. After that: 1a. Read through all of ITS#3950, and play around with that. 1b. Try "strace -r" to see if you're spending a lot of time in an unexpected function, sched_yield or otherwise. 2. To work towards filing an ITS, try something along the lines of Function Check to see the code path. One Howard Chu uses it for profiling slapd; see http://www.highlandsun.com/hyc/fncchk154.tgz Of course, you want to compile with (assuming gcc here) "-g -finstrument-functions" etc.
