Will purchasing an NVMe SSD noticably improve performance

[odinson]

Hi,

... but I've been wondering where the primary performance bottleneck lies in the PBP. Is it the eMMC interface? ...

Ben

Hi Ben, please describe in more detail this performance bottleneck you describe above. I am curious about the context of your observation.

Hi,

I have nothing to point fingers at in particular. It's just that on several occasions when I've been waiting for the PBP, I've noticed that the processor doesn't appear to be pushed.

There's a couple of utilities you can use to get a better understanding of what you're waiting for on those occasions... install 'atop' and 'iotop' if you haven't already. 
'sudo apt install atop iotop'

While you're using the PBP, keep a terminal window open with one or the other(or two windows with both). Run atop with
'atop -d' 
and run iotop with 
'sudo iotop'. 

Keep them running while you use the PBP and when you hit a point where you get a slow down, check those windows. In atop you'll want to look for the row labeled "DSK" and in iotop just look at the top for the disk read/write stats. You'll see spiked activity on those lines if the slow down is releated to the eMMC, as well as the name of the process responsible. If you do see activity, then most likely being able to switch to an SSD should speed things up as far as those phantom waits go.