I've found 2 important things to work around this issue and I hope the mojangsters see this.
#1 for the tick issue, setting the tick rate to 100 seconds seems to drastically reduce the random crashes.
more importantly
#2 running the vanilla server client with the nogui argument DRAMATICALLY improves the response rate of the server.
java -d64 -Xmx2048M -Xms2048M -XX:PermSize=128M -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -jar minecraft_server.1.8.jar nogui -o true
my server was nearly unplayable with only a single person connected and now there's only a tiny bit of lag with 5 people connected.
this issue seems to be very specific and more importantly reproducible.
max-tick-time=100000
sorry for not being clear.
and while I agree that running nogui may be normal to some, this is not working as designed.
the 1.7.10 server had zero issues running with the gui open.
the 1.8 server is impossible to run with the gui open.
thusly a bug is apparent.