Oracle Database Discussions

I have two identical Windows Servers running Oracle 9i. One server is configured to use Shared Servers and the other is not. On the server that is configured to use shared servers we are seeing degradation in performance. Even if we simply run a count on a data dictionary view, the shared server will take longer to return the results.

I dont know much about shared servers so i wanted to know

1) If shared servers would cause issues like these

2) if there are any views or queries that I can run against the database to determine if this is the cause of the problem.

The servers were set up and configured by a previous dba so i don't know the reasoning behind the decision to use shared servers.