Have you guys looked into Leaves decaying causing this issue? I'm part of the developer team on a really large network and our new gamemode does an infection type thing across the maps. Once this hits the leaves and converts leaves to another block we get the 0 fps drop in 1.7.2.
If its leaves changing that causes the 0 fps then this could explain every single scenario put into these comments for this bug.
Btw, these weren't just leaves that were in render view. They only had to be in chunks that were in range of the client as the leaf blocks were changing.