Well, I can't really say what limits selinux puts in place or other CentOS specific apps, but I encountered various strange situations where no centos sysadmin I interacted with could give a solution, even with selinux disabled, so could be something else...
Coming in my mind: limit on number of new TCP connections per second or number of forked processes per second - they are the reason for these "delay" core parameters for mod/child init.
Using Debian stable was always smooth an without such strange limits...
Cheers,
Daniel