[TacticalNuke]

Thanks for the quick response, Lynne. I sent an e-mail to my host and here's the response I received (edited for brevity):

This wasn't a cron job being run by the server, it was a file called cron.php being loaded by your home page during the page load.

That is the culprit. I'm afraid I don't know what cron.php does though.

This is interesting because I recently switched from a shared server to a VPS server with a new host. With my old host, I was getting page load times of about 1.5-2 seconds with this kind of traffic. Now I'm at 3.0 seconds and that's no good at all, especially because ostensibly this VPS should have significantly more resources available.