Wireless networking is absolute fail.
I bought an ethernet NIC for $4.99 today. Luckily, Ubuntu plays friendly with it. I upgraded from Dapper Drake to Hardy Heron (about two years worth of OS updates I had put off because of the stupid wireless adapter). The server now has a whopping 320MB of RAM but due to my wonderful 10-year-old motherboard, can only address 192MB of it. Now that I’m running a lightweight OS, I actually still have around 25MB free.
The hard drive has been upgraded from a 30GB almost-cheating-death-drive to an 80GB which still has a few years left in it. Currently I’m using an astounding 775MB of hard drive space. I love Linux.
Regardless, I’m now pretty sure that my paltry home internet speeds are the main bottleneck rather than slow parsing times.