My annual node performance tests are now live: https://blog.lopp.net/2023-bitcoin-node-performance-tests/
I've enjoyed reading these the past few years. Thanks.
I read the article and noticed you're still using a dbcache setting of 24000. I'm pretty sure i've read a post bitcoin stackexchange that bitcoin core has s hardcoded limit around 16GB. Which matches your results of seeing a max usage of 16.7GB of ram. Maybe you can get that limit increased? I haven't dug into the code to see if it's an easy change to make before building from source. Or maybe there's a reason they put that limit on it.