PHP foreach is fast on local machine, slow on server – Shopify

I have a laravel artisan command that takes a page of 250 orders from Shopify and does an insert on duplicate key MySql query. It runs really well on local (still hitting the real shopify Api), it processes a batch of 250 in less than a second. When I pushed it to the server, it is SUPER slow on the part below(about 3.5 minutes for the same batch of 250). The sql query itself is still very speedy, but this data prep is SO slow. It is taking the orders by line item and formatting it for the value part of the insert statement:

        $items = $order["line_items"];
        $this->info($order["id"]);
        foreach ($items as $item) {
          $value = "(" .
          "'" .     now()                   . "',".
          "'" .     now()                   . "',".
          "'" . addslashes($item["id"]) . "'," .
          "'" . addslashes($order["id"]) . "'," .
          "'" . addslashes($order["created_at"]) . "'," .
          "'" . addslashes($order["email"]) . "'," .
          "'" . addslashes($order["name"]) . "'," .
          "'" . addslashes($item["sku"]) . "'," .
          "'" . addslashes($item["title"]) . "'," .
          "'" . addslashes($item["price"]) . "'," .
          "'" . addslashes($item["quantity"]) . "'"
          ."),";
          array_push($values, $value);
        }
      $since_id = $order["id"];
      }

Server is a 2 core 8gb ram Amazon Lightsail machine. When I look at resource usage while the command is running, there is PLENTY of ram available and the CPU barely even shows an increase (never goes above 1%). What can I change either in this code, or in my server config to get better performance. Thanks.