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09-14-2010, 07:30 PM

[eluser]echoDreamz[/eluser]
Well here a are a few things to add...

Is this a truely dedicated server? Or is this a VPS or a semi-dedicated box?
Is this a server class processor like a XEON or a Opteron, or is it a budget CPU (Celeron, Pentium 4, Sempron etc.)
Why type of HDD is in this machine? IDE based, SATA, SCSI?
What OS / Web server are you running?
What other, if any services are on this machine?
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I run a very busy site powered by CI, I wont give the link as its NSFW, but it gets ~300k uniques a month and my server specs are as follows (bare in mind this server also runs 5 other sites that together get ~100k hits a month | 2 are .NET based (DotNetNuke) 1 is Joomla powered and the other 2 are CI based).

3.0GHz Dual Intel XEON Processors with HT
4GB DDR2 RAM @ 800Mhz (ECC)
4x 250GB SATA2 in RAID 0+1
Dual Intel Pro 1000 NICs
4TB Bandwidth
Server 2003 R2 Std. Edition
IIS6 with PHP 5.2.14 running under FastCGI (all but 2 sites run dedicated application pools)

and my CPU usage stays ~35% constant spikes to maybe 70%.
Note that this server also runs MySQL 5.1.50, SmarterMail v7, SimpleDNS 5.2, Gene6FTP and a VisualSVN server.

First take notice if you are running a "Budget" class CPU like listed above, cheaper CPUs give cheaper performance to their server class friends like the Xeon and the Opterons. If you have alot of disk I/O using better drives with lower seek times, and better interfaces will assist with this too. Especially if you are using low-end IDE based drives. SATA drives do well, as do SCSI drives. RAID can also hugely pump the performance of disk i/o as you have >=2 drives serving data as 1. I have also worked with dedicated clients who have "cheap" network cards such as realtek that simply cannot handle the high demand of network throughput on demanding sites, switching over to better cards such as Intel Pro 100/1000 solved the issue immediately.

Give some more insite into your box and we can assist you more.