Hey There Suresh. When we went from 4.5 to 5.5 we found quite a degredation in our bulk plan performance as well. We didn't so much change properties or planning parameters to resolve, but other items and were able to knock the time down quite a bit. Below is our setup for this particular customer.
Our Scenerio in this case is 1000-1200 orders required to build in under an hour. I'm not sure what your criteria in planning is, but ours is based on 4 source plants with any possible destination based on a little over 40,000 rates. Based on the timeframe and criteria above, we have done the following:
We opened 4 bulk planning threads in the event diag
We created planning groups based on source loc - so 4 total. Each group contains around 250-300 orders.
We found that having 1 usa to usa tl/ltl/parcel itinerary itinerary was really hurting us from a performance standpoint. Instead we inactivated that itinerary and created 4 itineraries - each from a particular source to usa. This cut down on calculation time.
Other constraints on the itinaries which also helped, but not required were items such as - a min dropoff weight (we put 2000 lbs), max stops (we put 6) and a max distance between deliveries (we put 150 miles). Constrainting itineraries helps cut down on scenerios analyzed during the building process.
We also put a max weight on our ltl rate offerings (20,000 lbs) and a (20,001 lbs)min weight on our TL offerings.
Logging also attributes to slowing down the bulk plans so we minimized logging and make sure user/adhoc logs are only used when actually troubleshooting issues and not just randomly running for the sake of being on.
The final step we took was we have a FULL COMPUTE Analyze scheduled to run on the db every weekend. This is different that the built in Oracle DBMS tool which just takes samples. Oracle has suggested in the past to do FULL COMPUTE Analyes with the OTM application. We did see a difference when running our plans.
When we first went to 5.5, the avg bulk plan was taking between 35-55 minutes. After the tweaks above, we were able to cut it down to 10-15 minutes allowing us to reach our goal in running the 1200 orders in under an hour.
Anyway - hope you are able to get your plans running smooth
