Is there a way to test how many users my website can handle?

I plan on running my website initially on a开发者_开发问答n EC2 micro instance but am wondering if it's possible for me to test how many users it can handle?

Yes. I've had good success using httperf. Documentation is a little scarce but the email list is fairly responsive.

You'll want to set up httperf to bombard your site with larger and larger amounts of traffic. You'll start seeing error codes, timeouts, and slow reply times as you start to saturate your webserver with traffic.

You'll want to experiment with this or any tool you decide for load-testing your site. Good luck!

[Is it] possible for me to test how many users it can handle?

It's called load testing. Do it to find out.

There is also ab, the Apache HTTP benchmark.

Example call:

ab -n100 -c10 http://localhost:8080/index.jsp