Byron, definitely let me know. This is exactly why I created this project by the way - to catch and eliminate systems bottlenecks and maximize performance on people's machines. For example, I discovered that, at least according to these tests, that unless you are running Cineware or Element 3D, you should turn OFF hyper-threading for a huge performance boost in AE. This is done in the BIOS on PC machines, usually under CPU performance settings. Unfortunately Apple has disabled this functionality in OS versions past 10.6, which is just insane to me. However you can set "reserved cores" in the AE prefs to be half your logical cores, equal to your physical cores, and it should help. This way the maximum amount of RAM is available to each core and should improve render performance.
-TG