If I knew what they were running and how it was set up I might be able to help them get a bit more oomph out of what they have. Barring that, I could help them make careful decisions about what they should buy to get the most bang for their buck.

Out of everything, the only part of forumwarz that actually suffers when lag steps in is pwning threads. bumuming that they’re running a single-server solution, I would suggest sticking the pwnage system on it’s own server and storing all forum data on a RAMDisk.