The load on tower shot up, making it quite unresponsive. A few minutes later it settled down enough for me to check the system out.
I would think that programmers who know enough to check for robots.txt [1] would be smart enough to limit the number of concurrent connections to any one website. But not for something called “QuepasaCreep” which slammed this site pulling down the entire archive in about a five minute span (typically, about two or three hits per second).
It seems to have passed; I can only hope they realized just how poorly their robot was behaving.