How to Stop the Scale?

I run a web ap called kick back dot t v that like scrapes the internet for music videos. I wish they would put some kind of governor on these things. We started acually trying to build, there's a blog post on begin dot com, but this wr, we've got a ol. But we're trying to figure out a way to set thresholds to stop the scale. Just hilarious. This thing can be embarrassingly parallel, and it can run really hot,. And sometimes that's scary, and we don't want that.