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It's surprisingly easy to slam a web service with a bunch of bots - I wrote a load generation tool for my engineering degree's honours thesis in a few weeks (and I wrote horrible code back then)

Generally, you're on the hook for the parallelization primitive (Director/worker/reaper/aggregator), and the test data generator/stager.

The actual runner itself is generally pretty dumb, and is just there to take it's chunk of the request load, and dump it's results.

Then you've got the results visualizer that consumes and aggregates everything.

People look at Performance testing/engineering as it's own specialty because you really have to take in everything as a whole. You can totally make a living out of just doing that.

If JMeter or other off the shelf tools don't do what you need, writing your own load generator is the only other option. Fortunately, putting together a simple one is not that complicated.