I am trying to figure out a practical way to stress test a server for 300 to 600 simultaneous connections. Any advice?
Thank you everyone for the help. To be more specific (sorry I wasn't before) this is a Flash Media Server on AWS that will be streaming live video. I've been having problems with the video freezing/buffering for everyone and I need to verify if its on the user end, upload end, or server end. I mainly need help with stress testing the server with 300-600 multiple request before going live.
Best Answer
In the generic case (any application, not just a website) you can do this with expensive software like HP LoadRunner. If it's a website, though, you've got a lot of low-cost or even free options as well, assuming you've got enough client horsepower to drive the load. The benefit of more expensive software is making it easy and quick to change things like percentage of sessions that do CPU-heavy searches vs just browsing (for example.)