The spiders aren't much of a problem - there's just another site on the server that's occasionally got 300+ concurrent (within a minute) users. The spiders crawling this site are not nearly as rampant - there's maybe 1 or 2 that are actually concurrent (within a minute), but the cookie timeout here is 3 hours (180 minutes)
Andy (andyt683 - generous guy that paid for most of the server <3) has bought 4 gigs more RAM (which will bring us to a total of 6) and another Opteron 2212 for the server (we already have one), and he will be able to get into the datacenter to install it at 6pm EST on Thursday. So, hopefully we'll be past this one last speed bump.