About a month ago a wrote a simple web response timer, because I didn’t quickly find a tool out there that could do it.
I should have looked harder.
I finally found pylot — a python program for running HTTP load tests. Pylot does what I needed to do (calculate some statistics around page response time) and a whole lot more. Pylot is designed to benchmark/load test HTTP web services, so you can profile arbitrary URL’s with either HTTP GET or POST requests. Or, you can just give it a simple URL or two like I did. You define a simple XML file with your “test cases” (the URLs you want to profile, along with any parameters), and give it some runtime parameters (number of virtual users that will hit the URL, request interval, rampup time, whether or not to launch a GUI to watch the stats in real time).
Much simpler than what I did. And it generates much prettier reports and graphs, without the need for loading into a separate statistics program.
Fitzgerald Steele 