Hi,<p>Which load testing tools do you suggest for web application performance and capacity measuring. What is the best practices or proper way of doing load testing? Could you please share your experience? Thanks.
There are some very good, very expensive machines for this.<p>Open-source wise, there's Tsung:
<a href="http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/" rel="nofollow">http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/</a>
FWIW I'm not sure if it's good practice or not. I used locust.io recently. The client allowed me to ramp up request rates until I got HTTP Errors. I measured against their previous analytic sites. Of course this was a guesstimate because GA doesn't let you see the max num of simultaneous users. I found holes in the infrastructure that need to be remedied. The holes were to prevent anything similar to a slashdot effect. I also watched against the servers IO/CPU utlization, and RAM.
You can get a lot of mileage out of Apache Bench[1].<p>[1] <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/ab.html" rel="nofollow">http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/ab.html</a>