Ever wonder how well your webserver will stand up to heavy loads or just how well your new ColdFusion server performs? Think that you are ready for the Digg/Slashdot effect? MacOS/Linux users running Apache, there is a tool already installed on your machine called Apache Benchmark to do just that. Windows users can play along as well but may need to install Apache to get the ab.exe.

Getting Started:

Warning: Don't run this against servers you do not own especially shared hosting accounts. Bad things could happen if you do.

ab -n 100 -c 10 http://yoursite.com/index.cfm

ab -n 100 -c 10 http://yoursite.com/index.html

This will simulate 10 client connections each hitting reload 10 times (total of 100 requests). You can adjust the numbers to test different scenarios such as -n 5000 -c 50 for 50 clients with 100 request per client.

Resources:

Apache Benchmark

Tweaking Apache Performance

Benchmarking a server