We've recently been asked to work on load testing for some very high traffic streaming media, as well as setting up to load test a social networking site regularly, as it's being built.

Load testing has long been an expensive option. Take a look at this discussion on Google Answers about pricing for Mercury LoadRunner. If you don't feel like looking at it I'll give you the summary - $66,000  First year expense total. That's not including the machine to run it and the training and personnel expense. When presented with numbers like that, most people decide they don't really need load testing.

I was excited to see on opensourcetesting.org that Radview made WebLoad open source (GPL). I've since been playing around with WebLoad quite a bit, and annoying people for information, as well. Take a look at it here: http://www.webload.org/ 

Last night we used it on 4 new Core2 Duo machines with 4GB of RAM each and pushed them to their absolute limit in generating virtual users. We'll be analyzing the data today. Widespread blackouts in the Dallas area had nothing to do with our power consumption on this test - it was a storm that blew through. The sounds of the fans from those machines was pretty strong, though, and I'm sure the electric meter tracking power consumption from them must be spinning like a meat slicer.