What to use to simulate tons of connections for hotspot capacity testing?

Question

I set up a hotspot using OpenWrt on a TP-Link WR1043-ND (400Mhz CPU, 32MB RAM). It's on a 16/1 mbps line. I'm doing QoS with this script. I'd like to determine how many users can connect at the same time before the router can't handle so many packet flows that it has to give each client less than 1/[client count] of bandwidth.

I tested running ten downloads at once and it works well. I can see in top inside the router that the CPU is at 5% max. SIRQs is however at a very high value but I assume this is because of network activity, not QoS.

However I'd like to see how it performs under normal usage, which means a lot of short HTTP connections.

Is there any tool to simulate normal browsing behaviour like this? What tools are normally used for capacity testing? I'm confortable with both Windows and Linux, by the way.

Answer 1

I think website performance testing tools can do the work for you.

See http://htt.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cwiki/bin/public and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79733/best-automated-testing-tool-for-web-applications