Went to my cousins party on saturday (Leeds UK) and bumped into a friend of hers, who just so happens know a bit about FS and has a couple of production boxes running FS for his wholesale carrier business.
He recommended if I were running FS on ubuntu to recompile it, so that dynamic ticks were switch off and set the timer frequency to 1000 Hz.
I have done that, but the CPU idle seems to have increased 5% to around 15% and spikes to 25% when I make a single call.

Should that be expected on a lowly box with an old celeron CPU and 500mb RAM?


model name      : Celeron (Coppermine)
stepping        : 10
cpu MHz         : 901.571
cache size      : 128 KB

MemTotal:         508316 kB
MemFree:          276248 kB