So a Rackspace customer was consistently having an issue with their site going down, even after the number of workers were increased. It looked like in this customers case they were being hit really hard by yahoo slurp, google bot, a href bot, and many many others.

So I checked the hour the customer was affected, and found that over that hour just yahoo slurp and google bot accounted for 415 of the requests. This made up like 25% of all the requests to the site so it was certainly a possibility the max workers were being reached due to spikes in traffic from bots, in parallel with potential spikes in usual visitors.

[root@www logs]#  grep '01/Mar/2017:10:' access_log | egrep -i 'www.google.com/bot.html|http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp' |  wc -l
415

It wasn’t a complete theory, but was the best with all the available information I had, since everything else had been checked. The only thing that remains is the number of retransmits for that machine. All in all it was a victory, and this was so awesome, I’m now thinking of making a tool that will do this in more automated way.

I don’t know if this is the best way to find google bot and yahoo bot spiders, but it seems like a good method to start.