I need to benchmark a site, and was thinking of using ab (Apache Benchmark) to do it.

We need to hammer it quite hard, and we're interested more in how our app will cope, as opposed to the network bandwidth, hence we're doing it from localhost.

The other thing is, we need to pass in a random list of different query strings:

i.e. <http://search.site.com/?q=search_term>

Is there any way to pass this in to ap somehow, or an alternative http benchmarker that can do that?

Or will we have to write a script to startup multiple instances of ab with different strings? I'd rather have it all run from the same instance of ab, if possible, rather than startup 10,000 instances of ap.

Cheers,
Victor