Thanks John, really helpful advice!
I have echoed the posts with post meta on a single post and multiple to make sure it was working.
I like the suggestion of checking to make sure the field has a related field key.
I will look into the corn job, from my tests, it timed out when doing more than 500 posts. Would likely set the corn to 100 posts to be safe.
I also would agree that the number of records is not the issue, but in this case, my shared hosting kept throttling my site and I tracked down the slow queries to pulling data from the postmeta table, likely I can clean up my functions a bit, but it all related to searching for posts by custom meta.
Also I like to clean up stuff like 240,000 extra rows in a table that are not used =)
