MySQL optimisation for single laptop with 16 GB RAM

[Philip Gladwin]

Hello,
I am using MYSQL to store some tables of data which I use for data analysis.
The data is stored on C drive of Windows laptop which has 16 GB RAM.
I am the only User currently and access the database from R (https://www.r-project.org/).

I'm interested in spending a day understanding how I can optimize the system for best performance. I will be using about 10 schemas, with 20 tables per schema.
The largest table is
'sentadj', '1587.47' MB

I tend to perform LEFT joins usually on the larger tables and then aggregate them to smaller tables which I then study.



These are the settings in Workbench I've come across and show what I have changed them to:

innodb_buffer_pool_size: default 128 MB changed to 6 GB
max_connections: default 151 changed to 51 after I noticed my maximum was 18.

My questions are:-
1. Are the settings I've made reasonable? I understand bigger isn't always better.
2. Are there any other parameters which I could consider?
3. I came across join_buffer_size and tmp_table_size. Would they offer any performance improvement if I were to change them from default? Recommendations?

Thank you,
Phil,