[vsroy]

Thanks for the help. After upgrading my instance, all the query times dropped dramatically. The thing is, I did not even upgrade the instance that much (micro -> medium).

I'm guessing some important bottleneck was being hit, but I have no idea what it was (maybe 1GB RAM was causing spillover to disk in a query or something? like that?).

It seems important to understand what bottleneck I hit -- but frankly, I have no idea.