These are great tips for load testing any web service. Don't forget that you can also saturate memory, disk or network too, so watch those graphs too. I've seen load tests unable to saturate CPU because another resource was limited.<p>Also don't forget that you are load testing all the dependencies of your service. Database, caching tier, external services, etc. Make sure other teams are aware!<p>Also nothing beats real world traffic. Users' connections will stay open longer than a synthetic tool may hold them open due to bandwidth, they make very random, sporadic requests too. Your service will behave very differently under large amounts of real world traffic vs synthetic.<p>Other options if you are running multiple web servers is to shift traffic around to increase traffic to 1 host and see where it fails. That is usually a very reliable signal for peak load.<p>And don't forget to do this on a schedule as your codebase (and your dependencies codebases) changes!