Hi Daniel, Some ideas.
If you can change settings on your server check out the archive with very interesting articles on the subject on http://2bits.com/articles/drupal-performance-tuning-and-optimization-for-lar...
The building of the cache takes a bit of time and consumes CPU also of course. It also all depends whats your ratio of logged in and anonymous users (you can see this easily in admin menu). If your problem with CPU comes from a lot of logged in users
Make sure you disabled and uninstalled all modules which you don't use. Reduce number of cron runs and backups.
Try to see where the load comes from. Search and views (especially views with relationships) can be heavy consumers. With your own server you could use Apache Solr as a replacement for the Drupal search.
A radical but very effective solution for reducing CPU is to install http://drupal.org/project/boost it makes a static pure html copy of your pages. I'm using it on a few sites with great success, page loads dropped to 0.3s for anonymous users and also server load decreased with factor between 5 and 10.
css aggregation is very good for loading speed performance; I'm not sure about the exact influence on cpu but I expect its not of much influence so I would put it on. Wim Leers has a very interesting article on page loading performance: http://wimleers.com/article/improving-drupals-page-loading-performance
Good luck,
Hans
2009/5/13 Daniel Carrera daniel.carrera@theingots.org
Hello,
I'm having trouble with CPU usage on my Drupal 5 site. I just enabled caching, and hopefully that will solve the problem, but I want to look at what else I can do to reduce CPU usage further.
On the performance page, Drupal gives me the option to "Aggregate and compress CSS files". This sounds pretty good, as it would reduce bandwidth and HTTP requests. But I'm concerned that the compression might increase CPU usage.
Can anyone tell me if selecting the "aggregate and compress CSS files" option will increase my CPU usage?
Can anyone suggest other ideas to decrease my CPU usage?
Thanks, Daniel. -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]