>
> My guess is its something hypervisor related. If this happened on direct
> hardware I'd be more surprised. Hypervisors have all sorts of stuff going
> on, like throttling the number of CPU cycles a vm gets. In your idle
> case, your VM might effectively occupy 1Ghz of a CPU, but 2Ghz in the
> loaded case.
>
I will be building a new machine this weekend on bare hardware. It won't
be very big on specs, but this is only 5 million rows, so it should be
fine. I will try it there.