I recently needed to stress test a website to ensure that it could hold up in the real world – after some searching I stumbled upon Throng – a simple app for Mac. It allowed me to hit my website with concurrent requests for a specified period of time.
You can download the 7-day trial of Throng from this link.
The app allows you to specify a URL you’d like to hit, a time limit in seconds, and the number of concurrent users to simulate. Hit Start and it will immediately begin hitting your website – charting the average response time.
Alternatives
Load Impact – An online tool service to stress test your website. I tried it until my credits ran out – but I found that for my (simple) needs Throng was a better choice.