After troubleshooting this for hours and sitting on the phone with my hosting group they discovered that there was a problem with their networking configuration. The solution was made clearer when during my testing one of the VM’s suddenly couldn’t find the domain, and a simple ‘ping’ to the IP of each box from the other would occasionally time out. This ruled out DNS entirely. After the hosting group applied the proper configuration on their end the app has been stable and FAST!
Thanks for everyone’s help!