Some of the advice I've accumulated over the years: 1- Eliminate Spectre mitigations and other CPU security flaws. These in fact remove multithreading. If one makes a home use it is permissible to remove security patches, but it is a decision that everyone must evaluate for themselves. It seems to me that AVLinux uses Grub as its boot loader. In this case you have to put the entry "mitigations=off" inside the grub configuration file, under the entry "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT". Ask Glenn for precise instructions. 2- Intervene in CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS by putting "march=native" and "-mtune=native" in place of the generic "-march=x86_64" and "-mtune=generic". Decomment "MAKEFLAGS=-j2" and bring the value to 16. In Arch linux it's easy, but in AVLinux I don't know how to do it. You have to ask Glenn on his forum. Also I'm not sure they serve for a Xeon, but I think so. 3- Install the "Irqbalance" program and then start and enable its service in systemd (AVLinux uses systemd?): # systemctl start/enable irqbalance.service This program serves to better balance the distribution of calculations in the various threads. Actually, I'm not sure that it's still useful these days. Finally, I do not recommend using vaapi or vdpau for encoding; it produces results quickly but of poor quality. Better to use them for decoding only.