Website Load Testing Tools?

bLanark asks: "I'm in the process of converting one of my clients from IIS/CGI to Apache/mod_perl. I need a (free) web site stress/load test tool to prove that performance will be increased. Using this page as my starting point, I can see that there are quite a few tools to investigate. Has anyone used any of these (or any others) and what are they like. I need HTTP GETS, form POSTing, and clever stuff like simulation of caching of images would be useful too, I guess." The previous story didn't get much of a response, but that was about a year ago, but the submittor has shared a fairly impressive list with us, impressions about any piece of software on it would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

Easy

[epsalon]

Post it on the front page of slashdot...

New unit of site capacity

[GCP]

"By upgrading from IIS to Apache/mod_perl, we were able to increase our load capacity from 300 millislashdots to a full 1.2 slashdots while cutting costs by nearly two-thirds...."

Re:New unit of site capacity

[Kredal]

Let's see. 250,000 people come to Slashdot every day. We'll assume you get a story posted in the morning, right before everyone (well, nearly) gets to work, and they all log onto their favorite site (nonono, not pr0ns-r-us.com), and 1/3 of the users click on the link within an hour of it being up.

That's 83,000(rounded) views, if you have a single page with no pictures. I suppose we can use that as a basis, and people can calculate out from there, if they want to. So:

1 Slashdot (Sd) = 83,000 views (per hour).
1 CentiSlash (cSd)= 830 views
1 MilliSlash (mSd)= 83 views
1 MegaSlash (MSd)= 83 million views

The average high volume news site (CNN, ABC, Register) can probably withstand 2-3 Sds, while a potato powered, or C64 server could only withstand 10-20 cSds. Of course, the lower powered servers will have less to download, so a single Sd may be managable.

Again, this gets into how many pages/images Slashdot is linked to.

Further study is advised.