How to measure how much traffic a server could potentially handle?

Question

Are there any tools that would enable me to load-test my server and tell me how much traffic it could roughly handle?

By traffic I mean how many requests per second it can consistently serve without timing out.

I realize that every server is different, and so is every application that runs on that server. That's why I thought this route may be the way to go.

Thanks a bunch!

Answer 1

If you dont mind going the paid software route, then LoadRunner is a very good choice, IMO.

I have used LoadRunner in the past for doing this kind of measurement for multiple web and non web applications.

Answer 2

For a very simple benchmark on web servers (if your request is the same every time), you could use ab. A very simple tool, but it gives some interesting statistics nonetheless.

Answer 3

And I like The Grinder. The only downside (but I don't know if others are able to do this) is that it doesn't replay well the ASP.NET hugely long generated URLs