At what point should we upgrade?

[soja]

We chose another vds from NFO to run our website, in no small part because of the high level of performance we could achieve(Site/SQL entirely on SSD, Internap bandwidth), while still having tons of control. This wasn't a cheap approach, but we think it is worth it. We have a 2 core vds for our site.

Partially due to IPB performance issues, our site currently uses an avergae of 30% of each core, with common spikes to 80+% for each core(we have a lot of SQL traffic to game servers). I have even seen both cores pegged at 100%.

The load times on average are extremely good(near instant), even when CPU usage is high. Since we have high CPU utilization, we really don't have much breathing room for traffic spikes, is it time for an upgrade? Can web hosting perform fine at 70-90% CPU usage on average?

Thanks for any input.

EDIT: Site URL is http://gflclan.com/
The index loads sort of slow(and uses a lot of CPU). The articles there are causing it, and we will be hiding a large article to reduce the load time/usage. Browse the forum pages for a more realistic experience.

[Edge100x]

Web hosting can run at high CPU usage numbers but it is not ideal. If you're averaging 70-90%, it might be time to upgrade. How is the memory consumption? Are you using APC (or PHP 5.5 with its cache enabled)?

[soja]

Memory usage is low, 420MB used atm.

I actually have not thought about cache mehtods. I will look into that. We are using PHP 5.3.26 (we used cPanel to get everything running)

[Edge100x]

cPanel might enable APC by default, but it's worth checking out -- it makes a noticeable difference under many workloads. Also worth checking out is MySQL, and its caching variables, if you're using it heavily. With spare memory, you will have some wiggle room.

[soja]

cPanel might enable APC by default, but it's worth checking out -- it makes a noticeable difference under many workloads. Also worth checking out is MySQL, and its caching variables, if you're using it heavily. With spare memory, you will have some wiggle room.

Thanks I will check that out tomorrow.

[soja]

I haven't enabled any PHP caching, but we started using mysqls default my-large.cnf and we have seen a bump in memory usage and performance.

Cpanels my.cnf by default is practically empty, thanks John.