Alright, updates to my experience with Suwayomi for those that might stumble upon this in the future. Turns out a lot of my problems were solvable.

The biggest fix I made was running it from SSD rather than straight from my HDD array. This fixed a lot of the slowness. My SSD cache drive on my NAS isn’t the biggest, so I was able to use docker volume mappings to stick the downloads folder onto the array while leaving the rest of the app files on the cache SSD. This has dramatically helped speed things up.

The other main thing that helped was enabling websockets in my reverse proxy. It turns out that the main reason the web ui was so unresponsive is that it heavily uses websockets to do things like update progress bars and the like. I have to deal with CGNAT, so it is a bit involved to set up (some extra lines in a couple nginx config files), so it isn’t something I do by default for each of my services. It helps dramatically with Suwayomi.

Since making these improvements, it has been much nicer to use.