Is the use of the DBMS_LOCK package compatible with RAC

In an attempt to control object locking in a more refined way and implement shared row locking I changed my data manipulation APIs to use the DBMS_LOCK package.  This gave me more fine-grained control over locking and while it did indeed improve the throughput in terms of concurrent operations and minimized locked out scenarios, performance began to significantly degrade as the number of the allocated locks increased. I encountered two serious problems (exponential degradation of performance if a large number of locks are held per session and the explosive growth of the DBMS_LOCK_ALLOCATED table) that I was able to workaround but I am concerned that it is not the best way to implement the shared row locking behavior I require. I have a few questions: