If anyone opened the console and noticed the socket timing out earlier - That was because I upgraded to a bigger 4-CPU core Amazon instance and in the process, I accidentally installed a newer version of the SC server (which caused a protocol mismatch with the client version). The load per CPU was around 3% on each core at its peak of 250 concurrent users.

There were occasional spikes to 6% CPU use per core when people started spamming :p