Hi,
first of all try to make systems as much identical as possible. I ones had a problem of having too big bufferpool. On test system it was 10-times smaller and some specific SQLs run 10-times better. So I would suggest you to set test and production environment as identical as possible.

By the way, have you created new database on both of the systems or you just created new database on test system, but on production you create backup and restore from v8.2 database. If so try to look into DBM and DB cfg parameteres. Automatic memory management is not turned on if database is migrated (backup/restore) from previous version, but is turned on if you create new database.

It can also be file system, but I don't know I haven't tested on ZFS and UFS. I always use ext3 on Linux systems. But as I have said before, check for any settings that are different on test/production and make them equal.
Regards