...and made its behaviour sporadic, to appear to have a
human browser behind it...
But, actually, this is a very telling comment. In fact, this
is the first time you called your process anything at all
(in your original message, you refer to it as a "test" and
as "accesses").
What did you call it in the user-agent field? And, if
you don't think it is a robot, a cache, or a proxy,
what do you think it is? If you have some animal that
is is none of these things, then we either must expand
our definition of the animals we have, or define some
new animals.
PF