Smarty causing contact import to fail
The speed you experience seems to be much slower than usual (not that contact imports are super fast, but civi can do better than 1 per second ;)

What is the field mapping you use? the less fields you import, the faster it's going to be (mostly true, some are more expensive than others, eg current employer if you import individuals)

Are the salutations one of the fields you alter?

What is the dedupe rule you use? 
Some of the out of the box rules are optimised, but if you create and use your own, it might end up being super slow

What is the rule you use? update data is more expensive than ignoring duplicates, skip or replace