I don't understand when people go crazy with their servers after getting mentioned on the social web because of the load. It's short lived, no need to panic, just make the page static.

    wget http://www.mysite.com/page-being-hit-all-the-time -O /var/www/static.html

and add a rule to your webserver

    location /page-being-hit-all-the-time {
        return /var/www/static.html;
    }