Web applications benchmarking

Hi guys! Since we're heading towards the start of the web application benchmarking, I'd like to hear some more thoughts about how this should be made.. Me, Paul and Olafur had a discussion about this topic and we saw how RUBIS had made with their newest "addition", using Virtual machines. The purpose of this was to make the installation and setup-part easier. http://rubis.ow2.org/(first news-post). I thought this was a good idea that could give advanced results back by a simple installation, although I think the efforts of creating it could slightly higher (or more). Would this scenario be a good setup for a useful web application benchmark? - The script automatically sets up three VM's: one for webserving, one for database and one for the client. - The VM's make sure they can connect to each other. - The Client VM start accessing the webserver and logs the amount of requests per seconds. Rubis have some documentation of their system with 3 videos that you might take a look at. Mich - do you have any comments? :) btw, there's also some kind of small documentation up for the cli-bench at http://wiki.php.net/doc/scratchpad/benchmark Thank you and best regards Alexander