Does the Thread Views Updater cron job need to run?
 

Does the thread views updater cron job "really" need to be run?

I have a forum on a dual quad core dedicated sever with 8 gigs of memory. When the thread views update script runs, the cpu usage spikes and the forum is non-responsive for maybe 20 minutes.

1,000 - 1,300+ people on the forum at any given time
Threads: 154,690
Posts: 2,558,499
Members: 51,124
Active Members: 9,312

The cron job was running every hour. During peak times (8pm - 10pm) the forum would become unresponsive. So I set the cron job to run once a day at 5am.

With 1,000 - 1,200 people on the forum, CPU is normally very low, say in the 2% range. Even at peak time CPU usage might go to the 4% range. Memory usage is usually around 16% - 23%, even during peak hours.

Looking at the post for today, there was not a single post made from 5:00am - around 5:35am, which is not normal.

This brings me to the question, does the thread views updater cron job need to run at all?

Or, is there something else going on that would cause problems with the updater and make the servercpu usage spike?

The thread views updater is the only cron job running in its time frame.

If that cron job is taking so long (how big is the threadviews table at any time that you look at it before the job is run?), then try setting it sooner, rather than later. It takes all the information from that table and enters it into the thread table. Have you looked at your error_logs to see if you are getting errors? Have you tried repairing/optimizing the table?

The thread views cron shouldn't be that server intensive all by itself. I would be looking at your CPanel or WHM that might be running background tasks.

The thread views table is only 435kb - data length and 750kb index length. That should not be a big deal.

The thread table is only about 18 - 20 megs.

Error-logs - No I have not looked that the error logs. Are you talking about the logs in cpanel?

Cpanel and WHM task - according to WHM server status, cron.php is taking up the largest chuck of the cpu time. Where mysql might be taking 15% of the cpu time, cron.php is taking over 65% of the cpu time.