Spring RTS Engine

I'm trying to run spring with 7 AI on a map - I've tried several different ones, and around a 2K team unit cap. Every time, around 500-600 units on the map, the game become unbearably laggy. It seems my CPU goes psychotic, after about 5 minutes in the game and around 50-60 units it shoots to around 60% and keeps constantly climbing (I usually end up with 1-2 frames everyone 3-4 seconds and CPU jumping from 90 to 160% after about 10 minutes in the game).

I play Crysis and Supreme commander on my PC no issue (expect maybe for the one 10km map SC has), and I'm playing fairly small 100x100 maps in Spring with NOTA. I have 16 gigs of ram, a 3.2 quad core, and a 1 gig 4870. I have absolutely no freaking idea why this game looks at my processor, screaming "Food!" and eats it all.

You could try running the multithreaded version (spring-multithreaded.exe) Or try different AIs.

Type /debug in the console to see what part of the engine is eating what. Although the figures are approximate/not entirely 100% accurate, it's nonetheless a useful gauge to determine what is eating the CPU.

Which AIs are you using? Some AIs are more CPU intensive than others, for example, KAIK and Errors AI tend to be more CPU intensive than the likes of AAI or Shard because they have pathfinders, although this can vary from map to map

100x100 maps?
160% CPU?