Load Testing Tool
Here is a cool load testing tool that I discovered yesterday. Seems a friend of mine has been working on a load testing tool that is designed for web application developers. LoadStorm takes advantage of the Amazon EC2 cloud to dynamically instantiate as many servers as needed to generate http load against a target app.
The key objective of LoadStorm is to be easy and cheap. No servers to configure, and no open source to download and install. That eliminates most of the hassle that is a common reason developers don't load test more often. It's such a pain to cobble together the hardware.
Did I say cheap? They will give you a free subscription for 50 concurrent users (no expiration), and 500 users for only $40/month. That subscription gets you UNLIMITED tests for the month. So you don't have to worry about getting the test exactly right the first time. Performance engineering requires iteration because you find a bottleneck, fix it, and run the test again to find the next one.
My friend has figured out that by not penalizing us for running multiple tests, we will test early and test often. What a cool concept. And if you want to prepare for the Slashdot Effect, you can get up to 50,000 concurrent users. Here is hoping your site gets /.'d for all the right reasons :)
