Does mediapartners-google spidering slow down?

after adwords has been up for a bit

[cfx211]

We have launched adsense on our site in the last week or so and seen an absolutely enormous number of hits coming from Mediapartners-Google/2.1 (almost 500k) since then. It is distributed fairly evenly by day. Our site is quite large so we can handle the load and there are enough pages to justify that many hits.

What I am wondering is will the bot cool off after awhile once it has a lot of the site in its DB, or should we expect to see this volume forever?

Also has anyone redirected the bot to a specific server in order to keep it from slowing everything else down, and is that ok with Google?

[Jenstar]

Generally, the mediabot will hit each page once, the first time the code is called for that page by a visitor. Then it usually won't visit again for sometime (if at all). Since you just started AdSense, this is why the mediabot seems to be all over your site, since it will crawl each individual page at least once.

It isn't independent in that it will crawl your site following links. It will crawl each individual page as a visitor goes to the calls the AdSense code for the first time on that particular page.

Once all your pages have been hit at least once by the mediabot, you will notice the mediabot usually will only return for new pages. So the load right now is temporary.

Not sure about directing the mediabot to another server, that is probably a question you want to ask Google directly.

[cfx211]

So it took awhile to get through to the right people, but Google did answer our questions.

They say Adsense spidering does slow down once it gets a look at everything and builds up its cache, and we saw this happen. Requests in the first week were in the 70-90k a day range, the second week around 50k, the third week down to 30k and then to a trickle.

Google has no problem with redirecting to a specific server as long as it contains all of the same pages as the other servers. So if you are a large site and have the liberty of a live server not in rotation, feel free to send the mediapartners bot to it.