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I had the same thing happening, only not to the extent that you saw. My web server was overloaded because of a peak in visitors amount. I enabled the Fastest Cache Hack and the problem was solved.
After analyzing database and session data I saw that Protector took up some serious database traffic. Protector consults the database every time someone visits your site and it stores IP-data for almost every visitor. Most visitors have dynamic IP addresses you know...
I immediately disabled Protector because I can't live with this overhead. I'll protect my server some other way