Forgot to say: yes, I was seeing those (occasional) hpet messages also, so might be worth trying hpet=disable appended to the kernel command line and seeing how this affects the performance under 2.6.32-21. hpet on some machines can apparently cause problems with dynticks due to buggy hardware.
Forgot to say: yes, I was seeing those (occasional) hpet messages also, so might be worth trying hpet=disable appended to the kernel command line and seeing how this affects the performance under 2.6.32-21. hpet on some machines can apparently cause problems with dynticks due to buggy hardware.