FLIP Fluids Addon: A liquid fluid simulation tool for Blender

A question about many obstacles. In the attached image you can see that I’m making a big cylinder from many smaller cylinders. 60 to be exact. The big cylinder is rotating, by having the small cylinders using a Follow Path constraint on a circular path. This is taking a very long time to simulate/bake for each frame. Is the slowness entirely due to the large number of obstacles or is it also due to having Export Animated Mesh turned on for each small cylinder?

In the next iteration I’m going to also have the small cylinders rotate individually on their centers, like a conveyor belt, so the obvious solutions (at least the ones I can think of) to not using Follow Path won’t work but before I investigate other ways of making them rotate together I wanted to know if the Export Animated Mesh is part of the problem.