I'm just passing through but have experienced problems with threads in redhat. We have the same glibc version as you and our test binary occasionally crashes. Which is how I found this thread.

Our program works when we replace the allocator, it also works with another system here that has a later version of glibc (glibc-2.3.4-2.19).

You might want to try, like we did replacing your allocator. To see if you get an improvement. See Google Thread Allocator You need not play around with your libc install to do this.

Andy Gavin