Firstly, good job in doing all that you do. This new unity is obviously not even stable without mods, yet they just do this w/o proper testing. Not only that, oxide and the whole modded concept is IMO the major reason anyone would play long term.
I literally only play a little on vanilla general public, yet I play a lot building city scale compounds, stores, rifle ranges. I built a world, and even incorporated the electricity.

Modded is the only way so FACEPUNCH should love you guys. They should literally work with you and run every freaking change by YOU. Give you a heads up. Not just plop this crap out and everybody scrambles to fix it.
There are major communities depending on this actual alpha game. The Doc I see still runs his amazing servers, for years.
Now the server chrashes every 5 minuites!

Anyway good job to you and facepunch should be the first to actually have someone always working with you.

Have you tested to see if you experience the same issues on vanilla? The update was a bit rough for us due to the Unity upgrade and our patcher not liking it for some reason, but we're slowly working out the remaining issues with it.

I only played for an hr or so after update running vanilla and I gotta say it was more stable and better server performance. 
Still seeing a better performance running latest oxide this morning.

• Especially cpu usage wise. 

I unloaded all except whitelist and buildingrades (not bgrade) and no crash. Then I put back a bunch. It crashed again, and it happens when building. I think it may be zone manager, but I'm going to narrow it down.
I just loaded the whole array of messaging plugins that you said to switch to from notifier. I don't think that's it, I'll let you know when I find the exact plugin that is doing this

Performance is not improved. It has been taken away from. Example, the building I'm working on is a 470 meter indoor rifle range. This wipe it rendereds @300 tops!

So the many of hours last wipe was pointless. I already got 10 hours this wipe with it crashing every 5 minutes. Server.save every time I build more than 10 prefabs.

I hope its not zone manager. The tool is used for mass building. Give yourself 100 doors, and you can drop them and they dissappear. Crafting? Using skin randomizer to get 10 of the right door skins is a pain. Zone manager lets you drop all the wrong skins. For guns is better because you dont have a pile of AK's waiting to despawn lagging the server.

Sooo the performance issues you are describing are with oxide not vanilla rust.
Oxide is having issues at the moment and are being worked on. Cant blame facepunch when from what I am reading is not related to them.

FP are doing a good job and so is oxide.
This time next week most of the issues would of been fixed 
Till the next update :)

The performance issue I mentioned was that last wipe I could render the same building in the same spot on the same seed @470 meters. This wipe it only renders as far as 300 meters.
That is with or without oxide loaded.
So performance includes rendering distance. Cutting back on rendering distance is not an increase in performance.
If it performed better at the same rendering distance, that would be an improvment.
And Balance is not a factor, because cutting a little here or there is only a perceived performance increase for only some people that scrap in close with an smg. If you like to bolty at long range, or you just build a 470 meter target range, you notice the decrease in rendering to achieve a perceived higher peformance.

As far as the crashing. That only seems to happen when I build in a zone with zonemanager.cs loaded. It doesn't crash if I build outside the zone, or unload the plugin. Trying again after this 2/8 oxide update.

But again, even that could be prevented if facepunch worked more closely with plugin communities. I been playing since 2013 consistantly, and 10% may be vanilia. Nobody would play vanilia (the grind) solidly for 5 years.