I wanted to give an update on my situation... very delayed loading and posting and sometimes requiring refresh of the page to see new posts... I also found I was having a channel error upon load, even if I deleted my second channel. I decided to just keep messing with it, so I reuploaded all files, product, reran the script (since I was coming from 2.2.x) and using the repair/optimize tables tool in VB admin.... and at some point.. it finally just started working. I don't know what it was, I never did anything different but it seems better now! And my performance has tamed back down too.... No more help required that I can think of.
Andrew
CPU usage for past week....