I can say it's more than twice as good as it used to be, but it's definitely not "new" hardware. It was, however, the best that was available to assign to ETS when the need became apparent last Nov/Dec.
Previously, ETS and all of Doug's other sites were running off of a 1998-2000 era desktop machine w/ a P2-350, 384MB of RAM, a 10GB drive that was always near full (you guys generate a LOT of logs), and Win2k. That machine would die at 10mbit/sec of traffic on the site. Also worth noting, that machine was an "upgrade" over a year ago from something even slower.
Now you're on an IBM Netfinity 4500R server with dual P3/866 CPU's, 73GB RAID-5, 2.5GB of RAM, and Win2K3. Nothing new or fancy, but it's certainly more equipped to handle the site. This server should be able to take a bit more traffic than before, and have quite a bit more fault tolerance than the previous machine. The previous boxes had experienced at least one drive failure since I started working for Dave over 2 years ago.
They'll probably have it upgraded again eventually when Dave/Doug work something out for something faster. And maybe then I'll get to move them over to Linux - tee hee Just couldn't happen this time around <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />