Paged at 4am by a Swarm of Agents Hammering My Server

aivee-is-a-fool · reddit · 2026-08-27

A Redditor who both runs agents and hosts websites for friends shares a war story: a swarm of well-meaning agents found an invisible, mis-generated URL on a small ecommerce site, treated it as a "new page," and crawled the same product page dozens of times (with ever-growing =amp suffixes), pushing the server load average to 72 on a Sunday morning.

His fix: a hard rule for his own agents — never hammer people's servers; wait at least 1 second between requests to the same domain, because "the human can learn patience." He's still working on making agents realize they're re-scanning the same page. The thread collects others' methods for rate-limiting agent traffic.

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