Hardware and performance

Graeme,

Have you looked at Apache JMeter for load testing? http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/

I'm not sure it falls into the easy bracket, however, there are some good tutorials out there in google land.

A couple of great articles covering how to use JMeter are available here:
 http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/17950
http://javaboutique.internet.com/tutorials/JMeter/

Another good one here:
http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/usermanual/boss.html

Hope this helps.

Cheers
Brett