Load testing with Apache JMeter

You can only take a pitcher to the well so many times… I’d been thinking for a while
 about pointing readers to Apache JMeter,
 a tool for load testing web applications. I should add that it can test 
 a lot of other resources too. The handle finally broke, or rather, Tomucha beat me to it
 on Jablok with the post 
 A realistic benchmark for a web application.

If the big J in the name puts you off, rest assured that JMeter can happily test any
 server-side scripts (PHP, ASP, CGI and so on), database queries, web services and plenty more. It also lets you
 work with response data, for example to pass a session ID along to subsequent requests or 
 set authentication details. JMeter offers a good range of components for displaying the measurements, 
 which you can use as you like when evaluating the results.