The Ethernet port on the RPi is not a full hardware implementation. It’s partially emulated.
You can use a regular PC connected through your router and run iperf speed tests to see if the RPi has the same network lockup regardless of the storagenode software.
I agree, however with a network connected drive the RAM will be used much more than with local connected drive.
Also, since it uses the network for communication with the network and for storing the data, it will be noticeable slower than competitors and will loose the race much often than with local connected drive.
And this if ignore an incompatibility of sqlite with SMB and NFS network shares in general.
oh. yeah I missed the part about the network connected drive. That could cause serious RAM problems and ethernet traffic congestion…
Thanks for all the help so far, folks. This is a really fun experiment so far.
I was blocked for responding too much in my first 24 hours! 
So I took the advice of many on here and switched from using an NFS share to a USB attached spare drive I had lying around. I transferred everything over and restarted last night and things seem to be running much better now. It’s been up continuously since 10:30pm eastern.
I also disabled the GUI on the RPI, thanks for that tip.
Memory utilization is MUCH lower, however that tiny 100MB swap is still gradually climbing. Not sure why it’s even using that at all with so much free memory.
