Getting started with mysql storage, batch processing is taking forever

[kelfink]

I've set up the NVDAPI key in our projects and that helps a lot, but wanted to incorporate the database storage for caching.
I'm using a MariaDB backend, and found that specifying "character set utf8" in initialize_mysql.sql when creating the database, was needed to avoid DB errors when importing the NVD data.
Now that I'm past that, the "Downloaded ..." logs completed but now I see

[INFO] Completed processing batch 1/125 (1%) in 992,366ms
[INFO] Completed processing batch 2/125 (2%) in 1,784,160ms
...
[INFO] Completed processing batch 14/125 (11%) in 2,254,533ms
[INFO] Completed processing batch 15/125 (12%) in 2,280,112ms
[INFO] Completed processing batch 16/125 (13%) in 2,454,196ms

Here is seems to have gotten stuck. I haven't seen process 17/125.

which seems like an incredibly long time to wait. Is this the database taking a long time? My slow query log doesn't show any queries over 1.5 seconds, so it seems not.... I'm not even sure what 'Completed processing batch' means. Help?