I have no doubt *once it's running* it will work beautifully. The problem is bootstrapping the bloody thing.
It's not the CPU, it's not the RAM, it's not bandwidth, it's not SSD writing speed (the monitor says bitcoin-qt is writing at a mere 20 MiB/s). The only thing I see totally at full capacity is the swap, at 2.1 Gb.
Do you think tweaking the db cache setting will help? Is there any other setting to tweak?