We have begun upgrading hardware and software to a 64-bit architecture using Apache with mod_jk and four Tomcat servers (the new hardware). We need to be able to test this equipment with a large number of simultaneous connections while still actually doing things in the app (logging in, etc.)
I currently am using Python with the Mechanize library to do this, but it's just not cutting it. Threading is not "real" in Python, and multiprocessing makes the local box work harder than the machines we are trying to test since it has to load so much into memory for Mechanize.
The bottom line is that I need something that will really hammer this thing's connections and hold a session to make sure that the sticky sessions are working in mod_jk. I need to be able to code it quickly, it needs to be lightweight, and being able to do true multithreading would be a perk. Other than that, I am open-minded.
Any input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
In order to accomplish what I wanted to do, I just went back to basics. Mechanize is somewhat bulky, and there was a lot of bloat involved in the main functionality tests I had before. So I started with a clean slate and just used cookielib.CookieJar and urllib2 to build a linear test and then run them in a while 1 loop. This provided enough strain on the Apache system to see how it would react in the new environment, and for the record, it did VERY well.