So does anyone have any suggestions?
This tiny bit of data does not overload or stress the server at all. You can stop the timestamp displaying very easily though.
Your ‘query’ is a little vague. What timestamp is this? For posts, comments, or something else? And how is the SQL query affecting load?
WordPress performs queries to call up the data for your blog, but I’m unaware of a specific query for just some timestamp (other than functions like the_time() or the_date(), which work off the post object and don’t perform queries directly).