These days, Wandering Thoughts has some hacked together HTTP request rate limits. They don't exist for strong technical reasons; my blog engine setup here can generally stand up to even fairly extreme traffic floods (through an extensive series of hacks). It's definitely possible to overwhelm Wandering Thoughts with a high enough request volume, and HTTP rate limits will certainly help with that, but that's not really why they exist. My HTTP rate limits exist for ultimately social reasons and because they let me stop worrying and stop caring about certain sorts of abuse.