Sorry about the piss-poor site performance today folks. Now that the nightly stats have run, it's all become clear. About half of the total hits to the site in this young month have come from
one poorly calibrated web crawler. 409,437 hits, to be precise. In two days. Yeah.
Now, dKos has got some horsepower to spare, but not that much, and Scoop uses some assumptions about "normal" user behavior to improve performance, which search crawlers blow all to hell. The bot is now blocked in every way I could think of, and things seem to be returning to normal already. The bot's authors have already gotten a message about it, and I'm sure it was a mistake so no harassment needed for them.
And now back to our regularly scheduled carping about what a limp noodle Kerry is.