I would like to benchmark a website that our company is developing. It will consist of multiple web- and backend-servers.
To be able to properly simulate a large amount of request, I was thinking about using our dev machines (approx 15 Xp/Vista) and a few spare Red Hat servers as benchmarking clients.
Is there any tool that would let me set up these machines as slaves/clients, and then control them into performing a combined benchmark and get aggregated results?
The benchmark would consist of simulating a normal user logging in and surfing a few pages.
Apache JMeter is a reference in this domain. You will setup on JMeter as controller and as many slaves as you need for your load depending on available memory and cpu.
In you case it's better to use non gui testing for better performances results.