Affordable Load Testing For Your Web Site

I stumbled across a cool SaaS load-testing site: http://loadimpact.com/

They have a free option to drop a fairly small load on your web site and then report back metrics. They also have affordable paid versions with higher numbers of concurrent testing clients.

Here is a sample results summary when I ran a test yesterday against my Orchard test site running on the new beta Cytanium cloud hosting:

I'm a strong believer in dropping some test load onto *every* application before making it live. Certain applications can respond and perform very differently on a test server with two users than ten, or twenty, or fifty. Whatever load you expect, test at that level and don't be surprised about it later.