How easy is it to load test a web server. I have a server with one website on which is stored at a data centre. Before the site gets launched to the public I want to load test it for about 2500 concurent users. I want to check it won't fall over and the SQL database works with lots of users, page speeds etc.
Has anyone done this? what tools did you use? or should I pay a company to do this for me.

Cheers

Jer

There are a lot of free tools such as ab (that comes with Apache), httpperf, etc, plus all the commercial ones that you can spend thousands on. They all do pretty much the same, so there's no point going into detail, google for web load testing. Things to note are don't do it from the webserver itself (of course :), and any machine(s) you do test from will need to be more powerful than the webserver itself, otherwise your stats will be skewed. If you're in a largish company just get people in the office to hammer it during their lunch hour or something, I do that :) Trouble with automted checkers are they don't fully reflect a real live situation so getting an old access_log and feeding that into your load tester is a good method, instead of just hitting one page all the time. Google should throw up hundreds of results, let us know what happens.

Steve.