Now this shows, that in 0.20 seconds, 110 database queries are executed. Multiply by 5 to get queries per second. 550 queries per second is definitely not "low traffic" database stuff (expecially for a CLI utility!)
My god. That explains the unusually high load averages (~0.6) I'm seeing when running SmartCoin. What could possibly be going on that would require you to run 500+ queries against SQLite every second? I know very little about shell scripting, but isn't there any way to throttle the execution so that it doesn't run in "realtime"? Put a few "sleeps" here and there maybe?