I'm evaluating several Comet servers because I need HTTP Push in a new project of mine. I'm currently testing with snode.js/socket.io, APE (Ajax Push Engine) and Mongrel2. I'd like to run some rudimentary benchmarks, but how?
I have put the Comet servers on a separate VM. I have been able to simulate many concurrent users for Node.js by using another Node.js instance using the socket.io-client module. But APE (and some other Comet servers) seem to require a complete browser. At least something that understands basic HTML (like IFrames) and can execute JavaScript.
Is there any way I can simulate, say, 50 concurrent users from my desktop machine?