website load testing software

[lint]

Does anyone do load testing on websites? What tools do you use/find are the best? We need to look at performance, scalability, reliability and other metrics. Automated scripted testing as well and Freeware preferred.

[rage2]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313559

This is what we use at Replicon for basic testing and simple scripting. For the more advanced stuff, I'm not sure what they use in dev.

I still use this to test beyond performance.

[Zero102]

Thats a pretty neat tool, never seen it before. But I've never done IIS hosting before either.

I've used this several times in the past to abuse apache servers to see how they hold up, and to duplicate performance issues that only arise under heavy usage. It works great for apache and I'd imagine it works on IIS servers as well, but you need a linux box (or cygwin I guess) to run it from (unless you enjoy using apache and its toolset on windows):

http://www.celebrazio.net/tech/unix/apache_bench.html

[lint]

Thanks for the links. We're going to look at a newer version of the MS tool (WCAT - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/231282) as we're running IIS6.

No linux boxes here I'm afraid.