I had some pleasant success today with a project at work. Fed up with the freeware and even commercial applications, I wrote my own application that will let you apply stress to a web server. It's primitive at this point, but still very useful and (imho) well-designed such that future changes and enhancements will be much easier. So today's success came in the form of finding a sneaky bug in the threading that doesn't allow you to restart a thread once it has been join()'ed. I wasn't seeing any errors, just strange behavior. After fixing and testing, things appear to be working very well.