Oracle 9i, JDBC and DatabaseMetaData

after upgrading database to 9iR2 ..we downloaded and installed the JDBC drivers for 9i ( we are using JDK 1.4.X.... )

we have some web services that utilize DatabaseMetaData class. Now we are experiencing significant performance degradation in the web services.
Tracing shows that parsing stored procedures using DatabaseMetaData is a consistent spike in the performance time ....

Under 8i database and JDBC drivers, we did not experience performance hit...

any suggestions of where to look ... where to start.???

thanks,