New from PHP Everywhere today is a new posting discussing the use of a web server benchmarking tool - Web Application Stress Tool.

Having a problem with your bowels? Hurts like hell? You can check the pulse, use a thermometer, use a stethoscope, but sometimes you need to get messy and have rectal probe to find out the the real cause of your problem. Similarly, when benchmarking, we can use simplistic tools such as ApacheBench, but sometimes we need more sophisticated probes to find out the "truth of the matter".

ApacheBench (ab) is a nice tool for sending large number of HTTP requests and measuring the response times. But it has its limitations. There are serious scalability issues when you want to test anything that involves sessions. [...] That's when you have to throw away these simplistic tools and bring out the rectal probe. My favorite web server probe when ApacheBench is insufficient is Web Application Stress Tool (WAST), a free download from Microsoft.

Yes, I know it's going to be Windows-only, but it does look like a pretty handy tool. He spends the remainder of the article giving a brief overview of how to use the app, including how to get it to work correctly with sites that might use sessions to log a user in...