Regarding the hashrate: The problem is the big dogs have a RAID advantage because they have SSDs and multiple disks. The small guys have a single debug.log. We are spamming the log, and slowing the hashing down.
Any settings to disable writing data to debug.log?
No, this is with all switches off, the only way to do it is to delete debug.log while client is running.
EDIT: When its deleted while running, it will stop writing log data.