If something like this can slow your servers down, you're probably going to be in serious trouble when you get an inbound link from a heavily trafficked site. I

If something like this can slow your servers down, you're probably going to be in serious trouble when you get an inbound link from a heavily trafficked site. I'd recommend you put a caching proxy like Varnish in front of your web server process. Varnish serves 404s quickly and happily, and will keep the storm from even reaching your apaches. You won't even notice it when the scrapers come in.