I have just gone onto a VMS and i run my 2 sites on there including http://www.manlystuff.com/forum/index.php i am told and have found out runs very high cpu and server load and i am in the red on my WHM server status! how can i reduce this? please talk in very newbish terms as i am to all this
Check your MySQL process list when it's under high load to see what queries are causing the issue. It maybe be add-ons you have installed or something else...
it could be because of the Top 5 Stats thing too .. these modifications increase your sql queries try disabling it and see
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/datastore VBulletin is known for being a resource hog. Caching can help considerably. Also check here: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=121876
Buy more RAM, (memory) How much GB of RAM do you have? I suggest you get more if you have high load. Also i have some articles to speed up your forums. http://forum.vbdiscussions.com/articles.php
the speed isnt that bad - just worried about crashing the server - how much will it go to, if it was to crash?
i) Try enabling cache for anonymous users. Not sure if it is there on VB, but avaiable in other CMS, like in wordpress supercache./ (Drupal - performance->cache) I had this with one of client's drupal site last month, the hosting suspended my acc, and then I had to enable cache for anonymous users and after that no issue till now. ii) Any email notification/subscription email queues etc can hinder the perf. iii) Check for any file not found errors in logs (htdocs) iv) Also, may be you could try asking your hosting support to check which script/process is eating the CPU cycles. Just out of my exp, Sorry, if this is not relavent for you, I dont have much experience with vB