Thank goodness new servers are forthcoming. But actually they were needed a month ago already. Edit counts have been dropping on most Wikipedias for some time now.
So far it seems we have been ordering servers when performance deteriorated. Given the fact that from ordering till installation some weeks pass:
I wonder if it would be possible to define some criteria that would trigger a hardware upgrade before the bottleneck becomes severe. I'm no expert on this, but I'm thinking of average response times rising above a threshold for a reasonably long period (long period in order to filter out temporary setbacks).
Erik Zachte