Ask HN: 15 minute server load average over 125

So we are preparing to launch a site on Monday and one of our servers stores and serves PDF's as well as converts the PDF's to individual screens from each page in the PDF. One of my coworkers decided to create a recursive script to upload the needed launch files (2000+) via Curl to the API of this media server. This server was never optimized to handle all these requests and now the server is unresponsive with the last command that was accepted approx 4 hours ago showing the loads as: 10:51:04 up 86 days, 3:39, 2 users, load average: 187.47, 175.52, 128.39 A top result from about 20 minutes prior showed: top - 10:34:55 up 86 days, 3:23, 2 users, load average: 109.13, 81.57, 48.53 He should've stopped the process then, but now we are in this mess... Should I just restart the server or will this load possibly eventually catch up?