While testing Drupal's performance between two different NFS servers, I thought it'd be best to test some of the slower pages in the admin interface, so I had to figure out how to use apache bench as an authenticated user.

A quick google search brings up two methods:

http://ezra-g.com/blog/20080229/benchmarking-authenticated-drupal-users-...
http://2bits.com/articles/using-apachebench-benchmarking-logged-users-au...

Both seem fine, but not nearly lazy enough for me, so I went ahead and wrote this script:

http://github.com/msonnabaum/DrupalBench/blob/eb9ab9415c9b5067e7284d4402...

Basically, it works exactly like ab does, it just prompts you for your drupal login first. Any argument you give the script simply gets passed to ab. Here's how you'd use it:

./drplb.sh -c 1 -n 10 http://colonqbang.com/

I've tested it on OSX and Debian so far, and everything seems to be working well!