You could also temp-ban those IPs for a few hours and save yourself some CPU and bandwidth. It may not seem like much, but I spent a year or two adminning a >1

You could also temp-ban those IPs for a few hours and save yourself some CPU and bandwidth. It may not seem like much, but I spent a year or two adminning a >1 million reqs / day cluster, and it does add up. Auto-banning this type of obvious offender (with fail2ban, as it happens) did result in a noticeable improvement for us.