Benchmarking Drupal Website

Benchmarking is an important aspect of website. Some website fare well for less traffic but as traffic increases they die out due to some part of the code. Due to this benchmarking the website once its ready to go live is very much essential.

1) Apache people came with a very nice tool for Benchmarking websites - it is called "ab" - Apache Benchmarking. This is a very powerful tool to test your website for possible

Apache website says:
"ab is a tool for benchmarking your Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server. It is designed to give you an impression of how your current Apache installation performs. This especially shows you how many requests per second your Apache installation is capable of serving."

Read more about ab at
httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html (Apache 2.0)
httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/programs/ab.html (Apache 1.3)

2) Devel module is very useful in checking your drupal installation.

There are many other testing tools, some of them are mentioned at
http://opensourcetesting.org/performance.php

References:
Benchmarking Drupal Code

Please share your thoughts as how do you benchmark your websites.

Thanks
Vinay