I wonder, does it matter if you put the same amount of machines in a single chunk or 2 separate ones next to eachother if you load them both anyway?
A player loads 10 chunks each direction around him, imagine they're all 'empty' and you have two scenario's. 1 chunk in front of you with '100 lag' or two chunks with '50 lag' each. Is there a difference in performance?
As I understand it, it's actually better to have all the machines that cause lots of chunk updates in one chunk. There is a saturation point of updates past which it stop mattering for a single chunk.