David came up with a quick tip for anyone stress testing protected pages with a stateless tester, such as siege.
- Log in with your browser
- View the cookies and find the session id (Firefox has a handy cookie search tool)
- Prepend the queries with ?_session_id=YOURSESSIONID
Now, any requests made will be as though they came from your account.
Do you have any other handy tips for stress testing your Rails applications?