Here was the problem: we were working on an OpenGL iPhone game and for some reason the frame rates were unusually low - especially for what little action was happening on the screen at the time. My first plan of attack was to begin commenting out chunks of the system in an attempt to see what module was causing the problem. I removed the physics, the logic updates, and some of the things being rendered. Nothing I did, however, seemed to create a noticeable improvement in performance.