I got a lot of this working MUCH better over the last couple of years, but this show can double, tripple or even MORE our 'normal' traffic. Also, these are drive by hits, meaning they have none of the eye candy files (all of the icons', glyphs, corners, etc), so each one of them hits us much harder than a normal user who has been on the site, and their browser has all of these files cached already.
I will also need to make sure that I get my site sucker warning scripts working a little more cleanly, so that if people start to suck HD for offline reading, that we shut them down QUICKLY. One person running a site downloader (like teleport), can make things very slow for the rest of HD users. If we have a LOT of people hitting the site at the same time, it can be horrible for performance.
tim/tickle. Yipppeee!

H.