FeedAPI creating MySQL queries that overwhelm the server

My site has been going down, and bringing others on my shared server down with it this week. My host told me that my FeedAPI module was creating pretty massive queries that were bringing the server as a whole to a crawl. I was pulling in a rather prolific Twitter feed at a rate of about 15 posts per minute at one point while testing, so that probably is to blame. I also had a couple word filters in the views page if that makes any difference. Either way, my host mentioned that FeedAPI can have that effect though even without the kind of high-volume feed I was pulling. He mentioned that pathauto can be quite consuming as well in conjunction with creating nodes from feeds, and could have played a part during the node creation stage. In any event, he advised me to be very cautious of using FeedAPI as these things can happen.

On the other hand, I really like this module and see nothing else I could use in Drupal to do the same thing. Anyone have advice on how I can configure or otherwise keep using FeedAPI to pull in feeds, sometimes rather high-volume and high-frequency ones, and at the same time keep the MySQL queries in line?