This requests goes out _especially_ to the 'hands dirty' developers who are intricately familiar with where our hardware bottlenecks are most likely to be. But anyone with solid, non-speculative ideas is welcome to comment!

As Jason said, he bought another gig of ram -- we are planning to basically max out the machines if that will help. That hard drive that didn't work, well, we'll get the right one soon, and that'll help significantly I think. Also, if I'm not mistaken, one of these machines has a dual processor board, but only a single processor, is that right, Jason? So that's an easy upgrade, once we find and buy the right part.

But, imagine this: suppose I were shopping at http://www.penguincomputing.com/, as I always do, and I wanted to spend around $3000 on new hardware for wikipedia. Presumably, this could either be one new kickass machine, or 2 new very nice frontend webservers, or whatever else we think we could best use.

Given that budget, what should I buy that's most likely to give us the best bang for the buck?

And then, of course, once we have settled on the general type of hardware (i.e. 2 medium machines or 1 kickass machine) that will be most useful to us, we could also extend our shopping to other suppliers. I have used penguincomputing many times and I've been very happy, but I'd go elsewhere if there was good reason.

--Jimbo