I am a little surprised that you are not looking into some kind of caching. Maybe this is more trouble than it is worth, but I would think that even using squid as a front end to cache even some documents, even for say 15 seconds between refresh, would help a great deal - not to mention that you could put that squid box on a seperate machine as a front end - I would think that 256MB RAM on a P2/400 or more would do it, using cheap IDE disks even.
Further, switching both OS and DBMS level at the same time might not be a good idea. Either switch to Suse with same revision or Oracle first, or switch to 9i first and then migrate to Suse.
