Too many hits?

I've recently been seeing my site slow down, and just yesterday I lost access to it. After searching around, I found out that my host had blocked my IP among some others, saying that there had been over 5000 hits from my account and over 15000 for the most active person all in a day.

Now, this seems a bit high to me, since a page refresh would be one hit right? That would mean that for 16 hours that person would have to refresh the page every ~3.5 seconds. Of course, if a page refresh constitutes multiples hits, that would make more sense.

So, anybody have an idea what's going on here, and should I be concerned or is it normal?

javascript chat ???

[JfishSoM]

Nope, I don't have that. I was planning on maybe adding it, but if that causes a lot of hits, I'll probably stay away from it for now. We do have a few mods though. We've got the advanced profiles where you can leave messages, the vBadvanced bit I think it's called that gives us that front page with the 5 newest announcements, the 10 newest threads posted in and such. I can't see how that would be causing too much of a problem though...

However, I have noticed that whenever I use the quick reply or pretty much any reply box, the little progress bar at the bottom appears and flickers every now and then, and the word "Done" changes to "Waiting for..." I keep thinking this may be something to do with it, but I'm not sure...

[cheat-master30]

As far as I know, hits are file requests, not page views. Hence hits can be multiplied by external scripts and image files. Not sure what could be using lots though, care to post what modifications you are using?

[JfishSoM]

Let's see here, I've got vS-Interactive Profiles, vBRules, and the vBadvanced mods added, along with a few BB Codes, a mod to change spacing on the front page, and one other minor change that isn't going to affect anything.

I don't think that's the problem though. I did find this little gem however:

AJAX uses JavaScript and features of recent browsers to allow additional data to be retrieved without doing a page refresh, such as posting with quick reply or editing a thread title inline.

Turns out that it was on, and when I'd type, I think it was refreshing over and over and over again. XP I'm still waiting for conclusive results, but I'm pretty sure this was it.