I find it surprising that it would cause issues. There are as of this writing only 162 comments in the thread, which was posted 17 hours ago, and the (simple!) web page is still very slow to load. How much traffic slows down a static web page with a single image? Even if we stipulate a quite manageable 100 requests per second, that means 6 million people read this thread and decided to click that link. 6 million people and only 162 left a comment? Can that be right?
>Even if we stipulate a quite manageable 100 requests per second,
Depends on the situation, but 100 requests/seconds sound like a lot to me (depending on how heavy the processing is, of course). And every page visit generates 8 requests, so that's "just" 12 people visiting per second.