To simply embarrass myself, I will explain what was the problem and how I solved it. Months ago, I installed a contribution for Autobackup while in the Admin section. I forgot about it. I later installed a visitor tracking contribution that populates the db tables all the time. The autobackup has a bug that runs a backup on every page load in the admin. I fixed it to only backup on the initial entrance into the admin area- so it backs up automatically- but only once per admin login.

At least I still have high confidence in oscMax as a solid and great site foundation.