I've placed an order for memory and fast drives for the new server.
After looking at it some more, it's going to take a bit of work and testing to get the entire m-by-mc platform running under Facebook's HipHopVM stack.
So, thinking that best is the enemy of better, once the components arrive,
I'll field the new server using the existing software stack which means we should see a performance improvement of around 54%.
That should be "fast enough" to make the site tolerable while I fix some bugs and add some features.
The long term plan is to get everything working with HipHopVM and make additional performance improvements to get this stuff to fly; but before I spend a huge amount of time on that I really want to get maps and the ride planner built.