[CentOS] tick_divider

Just installed CentOS 5.1 on VMware ESX and am attempting to play with the newly added tick_divider feature. It doesn't seem to be making any difference in the number of timer interrupts though. I set tick_divider=10 which should reduce the number of timer interrupts to 100.

I wrote a nasty little scripts that queries /proc/interrupts every 1 second and still see an increase each second in about 1000 interrupts.

The server is:

uname -srvmpio

Linux 2.6.18-53.1.4.el5 #1 SMP Fri Nov 30 00:45:16 EST 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Obviously not running 64bit. Only one cpu has been allocated to this vm. Has anybody else used this successfully?