I've pretty consistently stayed within 20 blocks as well, which is one minute and more than reasonable.
You're exactly right, the settings you changed are exactly what to tweak. I've been working on a new 'tutorial' post the past couple of days after gleaning a bunch of insights from our discussion.
I'm gonna put something together that goes through each piece of my scripts in more detail, including these mysql settings.
The high memory settings stopped working around noon today so it made it through the last night and and this morning and then failed. I started things up again tonight and noticed the server load go up to 18 in about 10 or 15 minutes with kswapd0 being the top process which I think is related to virtual memory.
I briefly looked for a way to change the mysql settings in docker without having to do the thing where I do a docker stop, rm, run, but I couldn't find a way.
At some point tomorrow I plan to go back to the low memory settings to see if they continue to work as well as they did yesterday.
This is good to hear. I only ran the high memory instance for a couple of days. I thought I had proved it enough, but obviously there's more to learn there.
As far as changing mysql settings in docker, I can see the settings with docker inspect but cannot find a way to set them.