We have fixed the major source of CPU usage that CraftBukkit was adding and are working to remove any other places where we add a significant amount of overhead vs a vanilla server. Combined with some other performance work that has been done this beta should be a solid improvement over the last RB in regards to CPU usage.That being said, Minecraft itself does require quite a lot of resources to run and there isn't a lot we can do in CraftBukkit to improve on that. We've still researching ways to improve performance further but at this point I think any major gains are going to have to come from future Minecraft updates, not from the CraftBukkit project. Also some things plugins do simply require a lot of work so sometimes your performance issues are only going to be fixed by changing what plugins and plugin configuration you use. Miles_ Your issue sounds like an issue I've seen with the PermissionsEx plugin. Look at the error you get when you try a broadcast and you should see what plugin is giving errors so you know where to report the issue.