Several possibilities below: http_load (http://www.acme.com/software/http_load) is a good tool, although it takes some liberties that can in some cases make it not-at-all representative of real-life performance. It's HTTPS support is especially non-representative, because it does not shortcut an ACK resend problem in the SSL protocol that almost all web clients do shortcut, causing a .2 second delay in every transaction. If you have enough clients (say 50), the delay per connection is small enough to disregard. For arbitrary protocols, we've found that Perl's Net::RawIP (http://quake.skif.net/RawIP/) to be surprisingly efficient. You still need lots of clients, but it's easy to code a distributed benchmarking tool in Perl with it. Get the source for a WHOIS and wrap a for loop around the send() call. DNSflood.pl (http://packetstorm.securify.com/DoS/dnsflood.pl). Sends requests with spoofed source addresses. BE CAREFUL!!! If you're not on an isolated network, the responses to the spoofed requests can leak out of your network, causing hate mail, bandwidth throttling, embarrassment, and possibly camel toe! The DoS section of PacketStorm (http://packetstorm.securify.com/DoS) can be a great source of benchmarking tools! Good luck. JMH Arnold Nipper wrote:

I am looking for a traffic generator for stresstesting load balancers. Has anyone an idea if there is software or anything else? I'm particularly interested in testtraffic for DOMAIN and WHOIS.

Thanks, Arnold -- Arnold Nipper / nIPper consulting mailto:arnold@nipper.de Heilbronner Str. 34b Phone: +49 700 NIPPER DE D-76131 Karlsruhe Mobile: +49 172 2650958 Germany Fax: +49 180 505255469743

-- John Hall <jhall@f5.com> F5 Networks, Inc. BIG-IP Test Manager 206-272-5555 "But what we need to know is, do people want nasally-insertable computers?"