The "guests" you are seeing are not Googlebot. Only "mods" can see spiders, for example, just now:
Quote:
MSNBot(2), Google AdSense(64), Google(79), Collective Media(4), Lycos, Yahoo! Slurp(2)
Googlebot was over 100 yesterday and it was "sucking" really hard (can see in the access.log file).
I think the issue might be related to our site map "update" for posts, which is annually, and it might be "that time a year again" and Googlebot is hitting us hard, which is "a good thing" but we need to reset the crawl rate in webmaster tools since we don't have the spare CPU for both peak time guests and a hundred Googlebot spiders pulling hard.
On the other hand, we are definitely behind in our server hardware upgrade. We like to have the server need a forum admin just in case of a major failure; and currently the server is in Ireland where reborg is; but he has been a but too busy at work in the past year to "do the upgrade deed". He has indicated recently he would be "back in action" soon.