Unless you plan to hire a few hundreds guys to set up a benchmark for your applications, you need to install some tools to automate your testing.
Automated load testing tools became popular in the late 90s to benchmark web applications. Today there's a vast choice of tools available, most of them are equipped with similar features: our favorite choice is the well known Jakarta JMeter which can be downloaded at the following location: http://jakarta.apache.org/site/downloads/downloads_jmeter.cgi.
Jakarta JMeter is delivered as a Java standalone application so it requires a JVM installed (1.4 or higher). In order to start JMeter, run the jmeter.bat
(for Windows) or jmeter
(for Unix) file. These files are found in the bin
directory.
Once the JMeter GUI has loaded, you'll notice two elements in the left pane: the Test Plan and WorkBench:

The Test Plan is a container for running tests. The WorkBench functions as a temporary workspace to store test elements...