Good research! Yes, I was referencing the “wa” output. Sorry, rereading I was too Linux-y and not enough English-y. IMHO the CPU wait you are seeing isn’t excessive and you aren’t likely to get much gain for your research effort. (Except learning of course, which is very valuable!) CPU wait is one of those things where opinions abound. CPUs are faster than disks, so what I’ve seen is on most home systems some small wait isn’t unusual and is likely normal disk reads. To get a little more detail you can press “1” while in top to get the stats by CPU. Also in top, under the line where you found the wait statistic, are two lines that show memory usage and swap usage. If you are showing little or no memory free and a lot of swap used then you want to look at what is using your memory and you would benefit some from having more memory - but your swap on SSD is going to be fairly fast.
VLC being jumpy in Linux is a great find. If VLC can’t play smoothly as a standalone client then Plex running both client and server on the same system isn’t likely to be a good experience.
Since you are thinking of a new Linux based system and are coming from Win, I have a few thoughts in this post. I feel like a dweeb linking my own post, but some people found it useful and I’m also lazy. So I’m a lazy dweeb. I own that.
