I/O and Memory issues, losing my mind...

[leesteken]

That's a good suggestion! I may look into that. The LXC containers give me a little pause for the *arrs/downloaders because I've got those all tucked behind a VPN.

That would prevent the zvol are slow and mismatching volblocksize that comes with VMs. If ZFS is will disappointing to you with containers, switch to hardware RAID5 and LVM(-Thin).