I like the idea of several small machines better than one big machine. At least, if the mailing list server is up when the DB or Web server is down, the developers can COMMUNICATE with each other to figure out how to fix it.
Wikipedia doesn't seem any faster this month than before Christmas. My main concern is response time. When I click on a link, I don't want to wait more than 5 second. Especially when I'm following multiple links: A links to B, then I want to glance at [[talk:B]] before adding a comment. At 5 or 10 seconds per user click, three clicks means 15 to 30 seconds before I can stop typing. It makes me wish I could do all my editing off-line.
Ed Poor