alcaray and McFly have a point, but maybe they misinterpreted my suggestion to run a pool of requesters. I was thinking maybe a dozen, rotated and fed with queues, each one waiting for a response. This would simulate a dozen people using the site heavily. I definitely wouldn't suggest setting up 10,000 requesters and letting 'em rip.

Even a dozen may bog down a smaller server. Using just one requester would make your software work at the server's speed, and transmission delays would keep your program from fully loading the server. If they complain, or you just feel like being a nice guy, you could even insert a delay between requests.

There are no hard-and-fast rules, just the general rule of be nice to the server and, when you get right down to it, don't get noticed.