I should have been more specific - HttpClient is a toolkit of classes that lets you simulate any HTTP connection. See
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/httpclient/ for more information and the free code. Here is a short chunk of code to give you an idea of how simple it is.
The whole load creating class was of course much more complex - each
Thread logged into my
servlet and ran through a test of 43 questions, generating responses according to a script in XML. As many as 50 simulated users (Threads) were created.
In order to really stress the system, it was set to simulate sending an answer and getting the next question every 5.0 seconds with random variation of +-0.5 seconds.
In the stiffest test, I was running 2 simulators on two different computers
to give a load of 100 users at the same time, I saw a lot of ethernet collisions and some of the users got dropped due to not allowing retrys.
Another popular tool is HttpUnit -
see this sourceforge page. Bill
[ September 10, 2004: Message edited by: William Brogden ]