I ran into the exact same issue. I suspect there are some compromised systems out there that are being used to try to post spam. I posted my workaround here - http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?p=63441#63441

It should kill most of the CPU/SQL/etc usage but it won't kill all of the network usage ...

If the same zombie networks are attacking my site that were attacking your site, the work around is very easy! They all never report a valid User-Agent which makes blocking them a snap. It took my server load down close to zero.

I wrote about it here - http://blog.tiensivu.com/aaron/archives/1303 ...

Hi!

HTTPS is definitely a problem; you'll leed to have the openssl extension enabled in your PHP confioguration, which most web providers sadly don't have. I believe that PEAR should work properly once this extension is available.

HTH,
Garvin

Thankfully I am my own service provider - I'm ...

The only tricky part I can see with this, unless I am mistaken, is that you have to contact and post your blog entry to MSN spaces using HTTPS instead of HTTP, due to the fact (mostly) that the MetaWebLog API has a misfeature in that passwords are sent over the wire in plaintext.

I know, unless I ...

Normally I would stick extra XML-RPC ping services in the custom field, where they belong, but since this is Google, I figured it was worth patching the serendipity_event_weblogping to add it into the list of options.


--- serendipity-nightly/plugins/serendipity_event_weblogping/servicesdb_en.inc ...