Re: What load testing solutions do you use?

I've been looking for load testing solutions, and there are quite a few
choices, many are expensive, some seem less than useful. So I'll ask here.

What have you used in the past for load testing?

I'm specifically testing Java servlets, which request data from either
HTTP XML resources, or databases (primarily MySQL). The difficulty I
have is that setting up an entire environment for our system is not a
trivial task (large amounts of data, and very complex system). I have
three kinds of load testing I'd like to perform.
1. Failure mode testing. What happens when the downstream datasources
start to fail under load, what can be done to make that more graceful.
2. Capacity and scalability planing.
3. Performance tuning for individual requests.

2 and 3 we can glean /some/ useful information from our production
environment, but we don't want to test failures or cause failures in
production, obviously.