With an XLSX pivot table - it is possible to base the data source on a range name. That range name can contain a very large range that is full of empty cells =) for example SheetFoo!$A:$Z. Then as we fillTable on this we burn a huge amount of time iterating over ~1 million empty cells repeatedly looking up the same pointless (blank) information =) Sadly a private example file, but no doubt reasonably easy to construct one.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 96588 ***