If you ran SER for a while on a VPS, read this!
So here's my very real and very frustrating, borderline depression inducing problem. It can be summed up in 2 pictures.
This is what my stats USED to look like, just after getting a brand new 4-core, 3gb ram PowerUpHosting SSD VPS:
And this is what they look like now, 3-4 months later:
See the problem?
This also happened to me on my last VPS. The solution back then, after spending days tweaking stuff, unchecking every box I could think off in a hope to bring down the CPU load, was to get a new VPS. And yes, I talked to Sven about it. He tried to help over teamspeak, turned off some filters but whatever he did didn't help that much. Only a new VPS helped (the one I'm using now).
So on this current VPS, the slugishness has been going on for a while. Never bothered with it too much because I'd get really depressed if I did. I knew how trying to fix this problem would end. And SER still managed to create as many links as was needed so it was more or less ok. But today when I created a new project to test out something, I snapped. The VPS got so laggy it was unusable and LPM was barely 11 after 15min of running.
Then I went in a "fixing" spree.
I tried deleting larger projects, running different combinations of projects, deleting every project except one, turning off every possible URL / word filter, swaping out proxies, cleaning up projects & site lists, cleaning up files on the VPS to make sure that SSD had room to breathe (it has 12/30 GB free) and eventually deleting EVERYTHING SER & CB related and reinstaling both.
Nothing helped.
As soon as I started a single project on more than 80-90 threads, CPU climbed up to 100% and more or less stayed there. Tried running in 4 different versions (7.99.8.00,8.01 and an older one, something like 7.60) but nothing changed.
In fact, NOTHING major has changed on that VPS or in the way I used SER in these last 3-4 months.
So my question to you guys who've been running SER on a VPS for a while is...have you noticed anything like this happen? Is this something to be expected? Like you buy a VPS and the dedi it's running on is in good shape with few users but over time they put more and more users on that dedi which results in it's resources being hit too hard?
Or maybe they oversell those resources? (even tho they specifically say they don't do that)
I'm at a stage where "conspiracy" theories like these seem like a perfectly good explanation because NOTHING else seems to help.
Anyways, sorry for the long post, it was part rant, part a cry for help. If any1 experienced something similar or if you have an idea why this is happening, PLEASE share and save me from this impossible problem hell. 
Comments
I-)
Yeah, I have something like that, except that I use my pesonal PC and not a VPS.
Mine experience is as follows:
At around 7.95+ I noticed that my SER won't have Out of Memory any more (earlier it was a nasty problem with SER giving OOM at around 450 MB of used RAM), but at the same time CPU [i5 3570K, 4 cores, 3.4Ghz] usage on some of the projects skyrocketed.
I tried to analyze here and there and it seems that my, well, "bomber projects" have a very hard time loading my CPU up to 100, resulting in staggering of the whole system. Maybe I delude myself and this is as it should, but...
As long as I launch for example one "bomber project" with engines Comment, Guestblog, Forum, Social Bookmark, Social Network, Microblog, this one is enought to almost bring down my CPU.
Now, I tried to make changes, one at a time, and the truth is, nothing from the list below helped:
Mine bet is that something happened with the engines or posting processes or whatever. But you say you used 7.60...
@Hinkys, I suggest that we take one project and launch it on our machines in pristine conditions and compare CPU load.
It needs to have same settings, targets, etc all right, but at least it will help to understand if we have the same problem.
I can prepare backup of one cpu-hungry project and targets and settings later this day. Let me know what you think.
just a side note on the op..."He tried to help over teamspeak" << not true as I haven't used that program for like 10 years as I only used it playing CS (no not that outdated captcha software)
Anyway yes 8.02 had a bug...8.03 should work better. I try to improve things on every version. For some it works better than on other systems. I even use profilers from time to time to find slow functions and work on that. But recently I haven't found a big bottleneck to be honest.
^^I just had some issues with a very sluggish SER and/or VPS last week. I wasn't sure which one it was, but I saw other people going on and on about how fast their SER had gotten, so I started to suspect the VPS. I wasn't sure because I really left SER alone for the past couple of months - so I really didn't change anything.
Anyway, I backed up my projects, did a complete uninstall of SER, removed all leftover orphan files from the two primary directories, and then reinstalled it straight from the GSA website. It was like night and day. I have my old SER back to normal and rocking.
What @dariobl said above is very good advice. Just do it and see what happens. Also use this occasion to go into each project and just review everything. I found a lot of new engines were added by Sven, so I needed to update my projects anyway. I am honestly glad all of this happened. I also found some a few bad settings which is bound to happen when you have nearly 200 projects going. Basically, review everything. Use this as a chance to regroup, tighten up the ship, and get off to a new clean start.
p.s. And get rid of the old emails and stick in new ones! You will create a ton of new links that way.
I moved from Powerup mechanical disk -> Solid mechanical -> Solid SSD. PU was miserable until the end when I uninstalled everything and rebooted - then it was passable. On Solid mechanical I could overload it and induce the poor performance you see but not as bad as PU at all. Rebooting, lowering threads could fix it. On SSD i have not tried to overload it. I'm running 100 or 150 threads on 2 cores, 2GB, 60+ LPM on limited number of projects - RDP and opening other application is fast.
I have no idea if my analysis is correct or not but all I can say is that increasing threads kills the performance and lpm does not increase. Do you see the performance problem linger after you stop SER for a time like I do? Can you try 150 threads just to see what happens?
But you do that at your own risk, I'm sure Sven won't like me telling people to do that so i'll say no more