I'm experiencing the same apparent lag and log entries about excessive clientside chunk ticking with 1.7.10 running 1180 or 1188 builds of FML.
Details: I am using MultiMC 5 0.4.1 on win32 as launcher, latest 64-bit Java 7 JRE, giving it 1 GB min and 3 GB max heap. According to visualvm, it doesn't seem to be running out of heap or permgen. CPU usage averaged 55 percent or less. Speedstep was disabled and no other processes were running than MultiMC, Minecraft, and FML, with the later addition of visualvm for further testing.
Loaded mods are asielib 0.2.3, Blood Magic 1.1.0, Buildcraft 6.0.17, Carpenter's Blocks 3.2.5, Chisel 1.5.6, CodeChickenCore 1.0.2.9, Dimensional Anchors 59.0.2., EnderIO 2.0beta147, ElectricalAge beta r24, Flaxbeard's Steam Power 0.23, Immibis Core 59.0.1, Inventory Tweaks 1.5.8, Jabba 1.1.4, Liquid XP 59.0.0, Mekanism 7.0.0.75, NEI Addons 1.12.0.1, NEI 1.0.2.15, RedLogic 59.0.2, Statues 2.1.2, Waila 1.5.3.
Significantly, however, the same problem occurs when FML loads even when I load no other mods at all.
Hardware is... probably not too weak. Core i5 4570 desktop, 8 GB RAM, running Windows 8.1 64 bit.
Logs here:
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/e10691745917e896a7ab
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/4e4340ac84f70bdbf982
I took a profiler snapshot with visualvm. I'd like to help sort this out if I can, so if you would like to have it, please advise on how you'd like to receive it. After reading your EAQ, I hesitate to make a wrong move. For what it's worth, the running instance was spending close to 100 percent of its time in the TCP connection handler.