I am experiencing the same thing, redpanda consumes quite a lot of CPU. I am running the Flatcar installation on a QEMU/KVM VM on my Ubuntu laptop. And the amount of messages flowing through is very low right now, about 15msgs/min. Due to the high CPU usage I normally shut down the UMH instance when I am not not using it. When starting up again it can take a couple of hours before everything becomes healthy. I am a UMH newbie so I don't know if this was the same in older UMH versions. Wanted to install it on bare metal but if my laptop struggles with it all my workstations would too.