[Plugin: WordPress Popular Posts] High-traffic site causing excessive load from admin-ajax.php

I moved to this plugin from “Recently Popular” because it wasn’t performing well under my client’s traffic (about 4M pageviews/month), and causing serious MySQL bottlenecks.

WordPress Popular Posts seems much more efficient on the SQL side, but it’s killing the server by calling admin-ajax.php on every page load, even static cached pages, using:

jQuery.post('<?php echo admin_url('admin-ajax.php'); ?>', {action: 'wpp_update', token: '<?php echo $nonce; ?>', id: <?php echo $id; ?>});

Is there something I can do to reduce the impact of this plugin for counting views? On the MediaTemple account it’s hosted on, it’s completely devouring the GPU allotment, far above anything else on the site.