Updated: https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/9HRRoOPP/
My problem seems related to the discussion here (List handling after recent pi-hole update is exhausting nearly all resources ) . My VM, which is relatively more powerful than the average raspberry pi, was really only getting stuck on the big OIDB list. It doesn't exhaust RAM, but instead seems stuck on I/O wait (the system has an average SSD in it).
I'll try checking for and removing the temp files from that discussion, but the db lock is what's troubling me here.
Thank you