Looking for feedback & suggestions to upgrade hardware for plotting

I bought a high spec PC for Chia plotting yesterday and looking for feedback on what I should upgrade for faster plotting. The relevant specs are : Intel i9 9900kf, 64GB RAM, Samsung 970 EVO PLUS 2TB, Ubuntu Linux.

I’m using 2 threads and 6.5GB RAM per plot. Bizarrely, only around 18GB of RAM in total is being used (but 100% of 1GB swap is being used - not sure why it is paging to swap?)

I started running 7 plots about 6 hours ago with a 20 minute stagger and they are, on average, now around 55% complete. Extrapolated out that would amount to 1.6TB / day, which seems very low for such a powerful machine given that you can get 1.2 TB / day on a Mac Mini.

My questions are:

  1. Is that reasonable performance for this machine? Am I using reasonable settings?

  2. What is likely to be the best upgrade to alleviate bottlenecks so I can plot faster?

All 7 plots on the same single NVME drive? That’s a little I/O intensive. You might do better with 4 threads per plot and slightly less parallel IMO.

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Understood, thanks! I’ve got a second 1TB NVME in the machine that I’m now using as a second temp device so will see how that goes.

Any thoughts on potential upgrades? It seems that RAM is enough (now up to using ~32GB, so still only 50%). CPU is looking more like 80-90% now on all cores. So seems like if anything to upgrade it would be either CPU or adding more NVME temp storage?