It's not exactly what you asked about, but I used to notice the same thing when I used ASP to perform database searches from my web page at work (www.fbpe.org). ASP of course doesn't have it's own data engine so it had to use ODBC. Someone would query the database and processor utilization would slam up to 100 percent and stay there for a couple seconds.

Then I switched to Foxweb. The querries attach directly to the Foxpro data using the Foxpro engine and little spikes still occurs but go away as soon as they appear.

My point is, I associate the behavior of which you speak to ODBC. I'm wondering if the software you are dealing with might be ODBC based?