Getting swamped by requests from Googlebot

Is this normal?

[Matt Probert]

Over the past 84 days, our server has realised what I consider a very high level of requests from the Googlebot, on average 392 requests every hour. Details follow:

Googlebot Access Statistics from Sun-25-Sep-2005 04:39 to Sun-18-Dec-2005 04:36 (84.00 days)

Successful requests: 834,511
Average successful requests per day: 9,934
Successful requests for pages: 790,788
Average successful requests for pages per day: 9,414
Data transferred: 6.92 gigabytes
Average data transferred per day: 84.31 megabytes (2.55 gigabytes per month)

Is this usual? It seems excessive to me.

Matt

[fatpeter]

Depends how many pages on your site I suppose. A Site with a couple of hundred pages may think it excessive but if you have a couple of hundred thousand you may be crying out for more!

[texasville]

Geez! But I am with fatpeter. How big is your site?

[Matt Probert]

How big is your site?

A little over 4000 static pages plus roughly 200,000 dynamic pages. (It's an encyclopaedia).

Matt