How to measure how much traffic a server could potentially handle?

Question

Are there any tools that would enable me to load-test my server and tell me how much traffic it could roughly handle?

By traffic I mean how many requests per second it can consistently serve without timing out.

I realize that every server is different, and so is every application that runs on that server. That's why I thought this route may be the way to go.

Thanks a bunch!

Answer 1

For a very simple benchmark on web servers (if your request is the same every time), you could use ab. A very simple tool, but it gives some interesting statistics nonetheless.