I have done some more debugging, and it appears the issue is with the VHosts... As soon as I comment out this line:
include "/etc/nginx/vhosts/*";
and restart nginx, htop reports normal usage. CPU + Mem all fine.
I think I am going to poke around a bit more, but it seems there is a problem with the way NginX converts apache VirtualHosts to NginX VirtualHosts.
Oh another thing, the errors that should be ignorable are actually not ignorable... They all dissappeared. My guess is that someone went around telling people they can ignore errors like this:
nginx: [warn] conflicting server name "79.142.67.113" on 79.142.67.113:80, ignored
nginx: [warn] conflicting server name "79.142.67.113" on 79.142.67.113:80, ignored
nginx: [warn] conflicting server name "79.142.67.113" on 79.142.67.113:80, ignored
nginx: [warn] conflicting server name "79.142.67.113" on 79.142.67.113:80, ignored
nginx: [warn] conflicting server name "79.142.67.113" on 79.142.67.113:80, ignored
nginx: [warn] conflicting server name "79.142.67.113" on 79.142.67.113:80, ignored
nginx: [warn] conflicting server name "79.142.67.113" on 79.142.67.113:80, ignored
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 79.142.67.110:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 79.142.67.113:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 79.142.67.112:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 79.142.67.110:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 79.142.67.113:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 79.142.67.112:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 79.142.67.110:80 failed (98: Address already in use)
Those errors can NOT be ignored, according to my findings... Oh and by the way thats only half the errors, but they all seem to be the same or similair to those ones.
Is there any 3rd party tool to convert Apache VHosts to NginX Vhosts? I am googling as we speak :)
Thanks for your help, it seems you may have nudged me in the right direction :)