title: Load-testing a web application
body: <p>How does one go about testing the server-side performance of a web application?</p>
  
  <p>I'm working on a small web application (specifically, it will solely be responding to AJAX requests with database rows). I want to see how it performs under load. However, I cannot upload it to an internet host right away. The development environment is, however, part of the local intranet, so I can use as many machines as I want to hammer the development server, presumably using Python in conjunction with urllib2.</p>
  
  <p>My question is, is such an approach really accurate for determining the high-load performance of a server-side script? Is there a better way to do this? Am I missing something here?</p>