Tool for distributed HTTP benchmarking?

Question

I would like to benchmark a website that our company is developing. It will consist of multiple web- and backend-servers.

To be able to properly simulate a large amount of request, I was thinking about using our dev machines (approx 15 Xp/Vista) and a few spare Red Hat servers as benchmarking clients.

Is there any tool that would let me set up these machines as slaves/clients, and then control them into performing a combined benchmark and get aggregated results?

The benchmark would consist of simulating a normal user logging in and surfing a few pages.

Answer 1

If you just want to simulate simple requests, you could use Apache’s ab.

Answer 2

I have used grinder quite successfully for this.

You may also want to note that we had severe infrastructural problems going from the intranet through to the DMZ where the servers were located, and this is not uncommon. No matter how much we pushed, we couldn't punch through enough traffic (Some companies can have gigabit internet connections from their DMZ and outwards, but the stuff pointing inwards is quite often a totally different caliber)

On one project we ended up with a few pizza box pc's in the server hall.

Answer 3

http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/