Ask HN: What do you use for benchmarking?

My worst nightmare is coming up with something cool, getting people to notice it, then having it cave under the stress of all of the traffic. What do you all use for benchmarking, and what do you consider a "good" score? I've been using ab (apache benchmark) for a few years, but haven't ever really known what I should consider a good response time. I just ran it against my latest project, and did: ab -kc 50 -t 60 http://thingist.com/ and ended up seeing an average response time of 2000ms Which is certainly much higher than I would ever want under normal conditions (although the site stayed up, and I was able to post while the test was running). Things like: ab -n 100 -c 10 http://thingist.com/ usually clocks in at around 300ms What do you use? How do you know if you're doing well?