Yeah what Image just said.

I remember something quirky going on about 7 months ago on Chronicles of Norrath. I experienced something similar but not while looting, just opening up a vendor. Since those processes are in the same processing loop one person could open up a vendor and stall the rest out. As soon as you right click on a merchant a select statement is run. I seem to remember just dropping my database, creating a new one and importing it back in solved the problem.

Rate limit the torrents to less than half your down/up bandwidth. :P

Blasphemy!

I wonder if it might also be something that could be alleviated with some cleverly implemented indexes. Depends on the actual bottleneck db-side, of course.

I did actually reindex and optimize after I imported mine back in.