I'm currently working on benchmarking a RESTful service I've made, and part of that is making sure it runs in a reasonable amount of times for a large array of parameters. For example, let's say I have RESTful API of the form some_site.com/item?item_id=y. In that case to be sure my service is working as fast as I'd like it to work, I'd want to try out many values for y one by one, preferably coming from some text file. I can't figure out any way of doing this in ab or httperf. I'm open to using a different benchmarking program if I have, but would prefer something simple and light. What I want to do seems like something pretty standard, so I'm guessing there must already be a program that let's me do it, but an hour or so of googling hasn't gotten me an answer. Ideas?
Answer: Jmeter (which is apparently awesome). This faq explains how to do it. Hopefully this helps someone else, as it took me like a day of searching to figure this out.