While I appreciate the feedback from Unix fans, I must insist that I know that the bottleneck is with the processor. I can watch MYSQL sop up the CPU cycles. A similar thing happened with the old BBS sofware (UBB), and from
VB boards and UBB boards, it doesn't quite matter which OPSYS you're running.
IIS has done a marvelous job of dishing out the pages to our visitors. We are averaging about 300+ megabytes of traffic an hour in our peak times. When the server stops for a second or two, it's when I'm doing something (or someone else) in VBulletin or Mysql. Like deleting a message. For some reason, the software does some type of complex removal query that takes several seconds to access the database.
Don't forget that we've got 12,000 daily visitors, and about 47,000 hits an hour in our peak usage times. For one singular server (PIII 850mhz 1 gig RAM IDE mirrored), that's not too shabby (in my opinion)...
Trust me, if you could see all the statistics on my end, you would be convinced too that it's PHP and MYSQL. I don't really think that PHP is too much of the culprit, but I can see MYSQL actually eating up the processor cycles left and right...
-Wayne