How to simulate heavy load?

Hi,

after I read the very interesting thread "Squid is OK but which Unix?"
I am a little bit worried about Linux's performance in Squid
mission-critical applications (HTTP caching and proxying). We use
Squid in our production server, which serves a small LAN (70+ machines)
and I don't think we will ever have the problems that people mention
when getting 70000 hits per hour.

But any way, I think Linux is great and don't like to hear bad things
about my favorite OS.

So, since we are far away of getting the 70000 hits/hour that cause
problems, I was wondering if there is a way of simulating such a heavy
load so I can see with my own eyes how Linux and Squid perform.

We have a pretty fast HP-UX box so I was thinking about telneting
to the proxy port as fast as I can a retrieve a cached document. It is
just that I do not know how to automate the telnet. I was thinking
about something like this in bash:

telnet proxy 8080 << EOF
GET http://xxx.xxxx.xxx/ HTTP/1.0
EOF

but this does not work.

Any ideas on how to put Squid and my OS to sweat?

Thanks in advance.

E.-

-- 
Eloy A. Paris
Information Technology Department
Rockwell Automation de Venezuela
Telephone: +58-2-9432311 Fax: +58-2-9430323