That is correct. I removed Auth from the model, and just added one dummy table, and this table definition had the same effect of auth.define_tables(). Then when I added "migrate=False" to my dummy table, the times for XML dropped back down to 20 ms. During all of this, the JSON times remained between 60 ms and 65 ms.
I will submit a patch to Massimo for the updated files for preferring C json libraries, using 'json' as the reference instead of simplejson.
