Christiaan Rakowski - Professional Profile

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When hosting web applications it is quite important to know how much resources they use, how that usage scales with users, and at what point the server will fry itself.
In order to test what the capacity of a server is, all you really need is (valid) traffic.
There are several ways to do this, depending on your OS and wishes.

LOIC: Yes, the dangerous hacking tool used by anonymous, it's actually very good at what it does. When configured properly and targeted at a server you own this tool can be very useful for those who want their testing client to be a windows machine. Be careful tho with any firewall or IDS systems in your network, LOIC has been added to most rulesets last year with the massive anonymous DDOS wave. Double check your rules before using.

WGET: When you use linux/BSD you will probably be familiar with the wget command. When used in a simple shell script with a loop and the right parameters, mainly -b and -r, wget will be able to generate quite decent traffic flows. You can make it save the output files for validation, or just append a --delete-after and be done with it.

ab: The reason I even wrote this post is ab. This utility comes default with an Apache install and allows you to benchmark you Apache, or other, server. What this tool does is generate http traffic to the webserver, just as if a regular user would be connecting and does this for as long as you tell it to do that. When it is done, it will give you a nice resultset of measurements which it can export to csv or an html table. It is not as customizable as the wget script, but it is a lot easier to set up and it saves you a lot of time calculating averages and maximum values based on the measurements. This is definitely the way to go if you need a quick test!