So, I just ran it again and found that the code worked quite fast. The problem is thus something funky in the Internet or variable loads on the Wolfram servers. I wonder if it would be possible for Wolfram to post a load meter that people could look at so they could get a sense of how hits on their servers are going to fare. Or maybe a load heat map showing how load varies by day of week and time. That way, longish queries might be a ScheduledTask to be run later. Or maybe a WolframServerLoad function?