this action will not reduce any lag. at least not if your computer is newer then 20 years old...
if your map really is lagging this is the last action which will save you. removing a single tree on the map most likely has a bigger impact on the performance than this.
Finally finding about some of the bots that are flooding the users online - bytespider apparently is a huge offender here - ignores robots.txt and comes in from a ton of different IPs
Ghan has said he has fixed this. Monovertex please confirm this fix. This was only a problem with people that had signatures in the upper levels like not the special members but the respected members.