Need help reducing server load

[vBET]

I asked about CPU speed, because as we already told Server Load is just virtual value, so for fast CPU same server load will mean something else than for slow CPU (fast one will do his jobs fast, so even if there are additional tasks waiting in queue those will be handled fast).
About your number of CPUs - at this moment I'm lost just like you. It is your server and I will not help you to determine do you have 1 or 3 CPUs. I can tell you that for servers it is better to have bigger amount of slower CPUs than smaller amount of faster. 2+2=5 it means that 2 processors with power 2 will do better job than 1 processor with power 4, because server have lot of small tasks, and having 1 processor you cannot do it parallel way.
Server Load will also have different meaning according to number of processors. If you really have 3 fast processors then server load 6 (total not per CPU) is OK even without additional checking. If you have 1 processor then you should additionally check real response time for our sewer. As you wrote you already did it and it is OK.

For time you see your server load is bigger and page slower (cached one - please remember that for not cached the real response time is not up to your server at all, but up to Google response time), please check is it because bigger traffic, or maybe it is because of some background tasks (like vBulletin cron jobs, or even your own operation system - like automatic update tasks or something like that).

According to your last response - if there is no real issue - do you need any future assistance in this topic right now?

[Simon Lloyd]

Michal, thanks for the detailed response, it is 4 cpu's, my only concern is the amount of % of cpu that vBET consumes, as i type this there are3 processes shown in TOP for vBET at 55%, 52% and 48% cpu usage and these processes are all for the file /vbenterprisetranslator_seo.php, if there is nothing more you can suggest then i thank you for your comments and will have to live with it as i definately cannot afford another server move or upgrade as i went from having vps to a VM in cloud hosting to dedicated in order to keep vBET running, the next jump to dual quad core (8 cpu's) is out of my price range.

[vBET]

Please note that what ou see it is not vBT CPU consumption but your whole forum consumption. vbenterprisetranslator_seo.php does nothing - just sets some variables and made internal redirect to really requested file - it is just front controller. All requests goes to vbenterprisetranslator_seo.php - you have set it in your .htaccess file.

So this is not vBET consumption - this is your whole forum consumption. For normal pages vBET does nothing - only adds flags. For translated pages whole translation process happens so CPU consumption will be always bigger than for normal page, because it happens after normal page is generated. So first normal generation happens and then result is translated - so there is no chance to have it withour additional cost. Or... We have solution for this ant it is named Guest Cache - for guests whole pages are cached and no translation happens as long as cache didn't expired. So if you are already using Guest Cache then vBET have no more solutions to make translations using less resources. You can only disable some translations - you will have then less traffic to translated pages so less resource consumption for translations.

We made lot of effort for profiling vBET, changing algorithms, adding more performance improvements. And we never treat this issue as closed. Still at this moment even with several layers of cache, we are working with application which have lot of changes and different content for same URL depending of user usergroups, or even for each user (if some plugin adds such things) and this requires retranslate for each logged user request. For logger user we can only cache sentence translations, but not whole pages like for users. Please note that vBET is adding more and more performance improvements – still you will never have magical translations with no resource consumption. Additional functionality always means additional resource consumption.

We checked your forum response time and it is really good. So I wouldn't think about switching to other server at this moment. Just as you wrote - you still have half of resources free. You pay for this resources so there is nothing wrong to use it. And you are still in safe zone - so even when your traffic increases your forum will response in appropriate time. For CPU first light is 70% of average usage (not just in some moment - average). This is first hint to worry about resources. If you ignore this then 90% of average CPU consumption means read light, alarm, and immediate needs to upgrade - otherwise even little more traffic can make drastic performance degradation. For memory it is different and depends on OS settings for SWAP.

And as PS - please consider solutions like VPS - where you can add resources very easy without any reinstalling

If you already fallow all performance hints then only thing it left is to disable some languages and made updates of vBET as those come.