How severely can Bots hamper a site?

I was wondering why my new server yesterday was running at a CPU load average of 16.0.

Could Google Bots really hamper a site so severely like this? It was going crazy on my site yesterday as I saw in the logs. And as you can see here -

(16,000 google bots in one day)

Do you have some cron job scheduled at the time when server load jumped?

Originally Posted by Oleg Ignatiuk

Do you have some cron job scheduled at the time when server load jumped?

Negative...why?

you dont think the bots could of caused this? It was a large spike that lasted for like 4 minutes..and then everything returned back to normal.

16? holy crap. most servers crash aroun 5. lol

It is unlikely that all these hits happened in a short timespan. You can check this in your access log though.

offtopic: My old sever never crashed hardly it was a really crap sever aswell and it could go up to 70 and would be so slow but wouldnt crash, but my current sever which is a lot better gets to around 8 and crashes, so its crashing alot more then my old cheaper sever which in return is quite annoying lol.


It could have been a short dos attack from a script kiddy if it only went to 16, the best way to check would be the logs.