Improve performance on Node.checkin() with a lot of children

[Micah Whitacre]

Hey All,
  I'm wondering if there is any easy way to alter my configuration or
setup to improve performance on when saving a node that has a lot of
children.  So an example of the setup I have is:

node <- nt:folder and with mixin type of versionable.
    /child_1
    /child_2
    ....
    /child_n

As n gets larger it becomes slower and slower to add child_n+1 (rough
estimate as n = 700 it takes about 10s to add each child).  The way
the code looks to add the new child looks like the following:

node.checkout();
Node child = null;
try {
     child = node.addNode("child_X", "nt:folder");
     child.addMixin("mix:versionable");
     child.checkout();
     node.save();
} catch (ItemExistsException iee) {
      //do stuff
} finally {
          node.checkin();
}
child.checkin();

Using JProbe it seems that most of the time is spent in the
"node.checkin()" method call (when looking at cumulative time).  For
my use case the nodes need to be versionable and I'd assume that as
the children of a node increased there would be a performance hit but
I guess I assumed it would be for a larger number of children.  My
<Versioning/> configuration in the repository.xml looks like the
following (values such as db.url/db.username/db.password are replaced
before creating the RepositoryConfig object):

   <Versioning rootPath="${rep.home}/version">
      <FileSystem
         class="org.apache.jackrabbit.core.fs.db.OracleFileSystem">
         <param name="url"
            value="${db.url}" />
         <param name="schemaObjectPrefix" value="conf_v1_ver_" />
         <param name="user" value="${db.username}" />
         <param name="password" value="${db.password}" />
      </FileSystem>
      <PersistenceManager
         
class="org.apache.jackrabbit.core.persistence.bundle.OraclePersistenceManager">
         <param name="url"
            value="${db.url}" />
         <param name="user" value="${db.username}" />
         <param name="password" value="${db.password}" />
         <param name="schemaObjectPrefix" value="conf_v1_ver_" />
         <param name="externalBLOBs" value="false" />
      </PersistenceManager>
   </Versioning>

My setup is that I'm currently consuming jackrabbit-core 1.4.6 with
jdk 1.5.0_11.  Multiple web services in multiple JVMs read and write
to the same repository so I have clustering turned on to synchronize
them.  So I am curious if this is a known limitation of
Jackrabbit/versioning, if I am doing something wrong in my code, or if
there is a configuration change I could make to get a performance
boost.

Thanks in advance for any help,
Micah