> The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling at this point

I have a ~10 years old desktop as my server (intel skylake and 24GB of RAM). I host about 20 services and the server is not loaded at all.

The services are the usual ones, nothing heavy such as LLMs, though

I have got 26 docker containers running on it. Looking at current utilization, it's 6% of cpu, 10GB ram out of 16gb. The issue is disk access. The thing has total shit bandwidth to storage, this was a surprise to me and a bit of a learning experience. It has an nvme ssd and a 3.5 hdd, but in the end usb drives attached to the usb 2 ports are much faster than either. It's a Lenovo, so I guess they cut costs somewhere and the usb 2 ports should have been a giveaway, but I was tricked by the nvme.