I believe Apache Bench is pretty widely used for this sort of thing and can be used without any problem against other webservers. It's command-line based, so it should be pretty easy to script into your test suite or pre-deployment scripts.
Not free, but excellent if you are doing this professionally is Visual Studio Team System Test Load Agent. MSDN covers how to set it up and run it here: Controllers, Agents, and Rigs. You can download a trial here:
Overview: Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT) is a lightweight HTTP load generation tool primarily designed to measure the performance of a web server within a controlled environment. WCAT can simulate thousands of concurrent users making requests to a single web site or multiple web sites. The WCAT engine uses a simple script to define the set of HTTP requests to be played back to the web server. Extensibility is provided through plug-in DLLs and a standard, simple API.
Features:
HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1 capable
Supports IPv6 Multithreaded Support
Supports generating stress from multiple machines
Extensible through C plug-in
DLLs Supports Performance Counter integration
Measures throughput and response time
Supports SSL requests
NTLM Authentication request support
Easily supports testing thousand of concurrent users
I believe Apache Bench is pretty widely used for this sort of thing and can be used without any problem against other webservers. It's command-line based, so it should be pretty easy to script into your test suite or pre-deployment scripts.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html
There are a couple of good tools available:
Not free, but excellent if you are doing this professionally is Visual Studio Team System Test Load Agent. MSDN covers how to set it up and run it here: Controllers, Agents, and Rigs. You can download a trial here:
As far as free tools...
Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT):
Overview: Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT) is a lightweight HTTP load generation tool primarily designed to measure the performance of a web server within a controlled environment. WCAT can simulate thousands of concurrent users making requests to a single web site or multiple web sites. The WCAT engine uses a simple script to define the set of HTTP requests to be played back to the web server. Extensibility is provided through plug-in DLLs and a standard, simple API.
Features:
Download the x86 version here, and the x64 version here.
I have used Web Application Stress Tool before. I'm wondering if this is a pretty standard tool to use, and if there are better alternatives
(WAS) can be downloaded here
There's also a kb article on how to install and use the application here
and a blog on how to use it here