I totally agree, this new machine is so fricking responsive that I still think bare metal rules but I am just so afraid of the system operations of such a machine. But maybe Paul can give us some hints and why it's still worth to go the bare metal route.
EDIT: since Heroku fooled Rapgenius and us all it would be one more reason to get into system operations again and host on bare metal.
Many people use baremetal for their base-load and virtual/cloud instances for their fail-over and elastic loads. Its not all or nothing.
I wanted to reply that it's actually relatively fast, not very fast. Much faster than before, but there are many sites which are much quicker.
Timing some pages, the response is around 350ms. That means 95% of the loading time is networking, not generation time. You're right, the server is really fast given the load HN brings down on one server!
seems the issue was more with the migration.
so i reckon you're good to get back to removing all the threads from your apps :)