This is NOT on the ADMIN topic because I'm not sure what I'm seeing yet.  In brief:
yesterday from around 13:00 until late evening, Maelstrom was extremely sluggish
due to WWW activity.  The server kept up with Listserv mail in and out OK, but the
WWW interface was slow, interactive commands took forever and the disks were run
ragged.

Once I had time to check the logs it appeared to me that around 60% of the WWW
activity was being done by a single user (217.84.47.170 - pD9542FAA.dip.t-dialin.net),
who was mostly pulling trasactions from a list with large archives.  I'm *guessing*
that this was an automaton pulling postings in non-chronological order, maybe by
author or by topic.  Whatever, stacking 30,000+ requests against a server is 
indistinguishable to me from any other denial of service attack and I'm not happy
about it.   

I changed the access on that particular list from "Public" to "Private" (which
immediately solved the performance issue) and a few hours later the automaton went
away.  Today I'm seeing similar behavior from 84.133.52.168 against another list, 
which I've also changed from "Public" to "Private".  Meanwhile, 155.69.5.235 seems
to be going through the lists alphabetically pulling the indexes and I'm assuming
it will start hammering some list soon too.

So... until someone tells me different, I'm under the impression that there is some
utility circulating that resequences archives, and we are seeing the beginning of the
end of the "Public" archive.  Since a determined user can easily sign on to a list
prior to doing this, I'm not optimistic about the future of "Private" archives either.

Anybody else know what's really going on?
                                                            -Kary