That's interesting I am sort of in the same situation. Are you wanting to check stuff like, VirtualHost configurations etc before you take them live? Or is there something else you are after?
I have setup a box with Gentoo/Apache etc for web serving and am wondering what I can do to test configuration before I take it live.
We've been doing the same thing lately and have been using squid to test the new server builds.
1. install squid on some box
2. basic config and tell it not to cache
3. put all the domains you want to test in /etc/hosts on your squid box. They should point to the IP of the new server.
4. Have your testers set their browsers to use the proxy.
5. test away
This is nice as you know your virtual hosts really work and you can do some more complicated stuff rather than just how fast you can grab pages.
For general webserver load testing you might want to check out Seige. http://www.joedog.org/siege/
kashani
