[RndTbl] Accurate Monitoring of system load

[Tim Lavoie]

How about something like atop, with process accounting enabled? You
might need to enable this in the kernel if it isn't already, but
should track all the info you might want. If you don't run it
interactively, atop spits out flat ASCII without looking for the
interactive commands.

There are also a couple of kernel patch options specific to atop,
which get you top-style info for disk and network usage on a
per-process level.

About JMeter, it looks a bit awkward for the sorts of benchmarking I
end up doing, as you configure all requests pretty much manually. The
other tools I mentioned are nice for dealing with a complex app, in
that they record a session by proxying your browser requests. The
script is something you edit afterwards to get it to capture elements
at run-time, which you play back as part of the script. As an example,
you might get an ID for some value during the session, and you want to
use that one, not the one you recorded initially. Naturally, this is
only if you need to do this sort of thing.

     Tim