Observation from a witness. I'm I seeing things?

I am convinced that there may be a performance bottleneck somewhere in the P2P system of the Hive blockchain software. Maybe I'm just crazy or something I don't know.

I'm currently sat in front of my witness console watching the logs go by and I'm seeing on average over 300 transactions per block.

The other thing I'm noticing is Peer churn, where peers I'm currently connected to are not responding fast enough and are being dropped.

Along with this I'm seeing block time offset also increase sometimes as high as 3000ms.

This all seemed to start when a couple of accounts started posting a lot of transactions with nearly depleted RC. It pops up a warning saying they don't have enough RC for the transaction then it's later included in the next block anyways because that's how it works. (there is a grace thing to accept transaction if you would have regenerated the RC by the next block or something)

Anyways when these accounts started cause these warning like multiple times per block (there was loads) My node started to churn peers, as explained above peers where being dropped and new once connected constantly and requested items aren't responded too.

This began to cause my block time offset to grow, sometimes as high as 3000ms and then drop back to the normal 35-200ms range and grow again. I also observed 6+ micro forks within 15 minutes.

My question here is.
Is there a performance issue here?
Is it my node? (Highly unlikely)
Is it because everyone elses nodes are struggling?

Do we just need better hardware now for consensus witnesses? (by consensus I mean normal hive nodes not just the top 20)

I'm just trying to understand the cause and if it's a problem that needs looking into.

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Thanks for watching!