Scalability issues

The conversation between grarpamp and an unknown person revolves around running Bitcoin on different machines. Grarpamp mentions that he is running a 1.8 GHz P3 Celeron machine with vintage 2.6.20 Linux, which should be slower than the other person's machine. However, he forgot to turn on timestamp logging so he doesn't know how long it took to sync the chain. He also confirms that his file system is using twofish-cbc-essiv:sha256 encryption. The other person questions if grarpamp is running Bitcoin on a file system with SHA256 integrity trees for all bits and AES-128-XTS/CBC disk encryption. Grarpamp responds that he is using twofish-cbc-essiv:sha256 encryption and agrees that encrypting everything is a good practice. He also shares an incident where he received a disk back from RMA with someone else's data on it. Since then, he has encrypted everything as you can't wipe a dead drive. The other person expresses curiosity about what Bitcoin is doing to make grarpamp's machine so unhappy. However, they acknowledge that grarpamp's configuration is uncommon for Bitcoin nodes in many distinct ways, so it's not clear where to start.