During the course of administering a server full of various sites which have been Farked, Dugg, and StumbledUpon'd, I've learned first hand the value of optimizing a Drupal site/server to handle large amounts of traffic. I've also learned that eventually it's likely that the level of optimization for one's Drupal site/server will be rendered mostly irrelevant by frequent, and (mostly) malicious, circumstances.
Malicious and/or misdirected requests
Compared to more popular subjects such as Drupal optimization, Apache, MySQL, and/or PHP optimization - the subject of malicious requests gets a rare mention. Despite losing the popularity contest to those sexier subjects, rest assured, there is a lot more to running a site than just tuning the former items. All of those things can be working really, really well and your site/server can still be hammered to a state of dysfunction - even with very few users coming through the site.
Welcome to the wonderful world of denial of service attacks and/or server spam. Broadly defined this includes anything that is requesting something from your server that is of a malicious (usually the case) and/or misguided origin. Make no mistake it's a problem which anyone who is running a medium to large size web site will contend with, whether they know it or not.
