I figured it out!
Just had to change the stupid quotes...
Now the script goes helluva fast and only uses around 0.6-0.8% Utilization, compared to 14% if the gunzip filename does not match properly...
ssh_function_CRE()
{
ssh readonly@$ServerIP 'YEAR=2009;DAY=28;MONTH=02;LMONTH=Mar;for t in 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 \
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23; \
do nice -n 20 gunzip -c /log-archive/access.log_$YEAR$MONTH$DAY
"_$t".gz |\
nice -n 20 nawk -v a=$t '\''{total[$8] += 1} END{for (i in total) print a,i, total[i]}'\'' ;done'
#echo "$Servername, $Date" > $EFCRE
sleep 1 ; cat $sshEF >> $EFCRE
}