Does the Thread Views Updater cron job need to run?

[kevcj]

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

Thread Views
This script updates thread views once per hour. This option is suggested for forums with large numbers of threads or users.

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.