I went through setting up netdata for a sraging (in progression for a production) server not too long ago.

The netdata docs were quite clear on that fact that the default configuration is a "showcase configuration", not a "production ready configuration"!

It's really meant to show off all features to new users, who then can pick what they actually want. Great thing about disabling unimportant things is that one gets a lot more "history" for the same amount of storage need, cause there are simply less data points to track. Similar with adjusting the rate which it takes data points. For instance, going down from default 1s internal to 2s basically halfs the CPU requirement, even more so if one also disables the machine learning stuff.

The one thing I have to admit though is that "optimizing netdata configs" really isn't that quickly done. There's just a lot of stuff it provides, lots of docs reading to be done until one roughly gets a feel for configuring it (i.e. knowing what all could be disabled and how much of a difference it actually makes). Of course, there's always a potential need for optimizations later on when one sees the actual server load in prod.