Use curl and a list of URLs to check for Internal Server Errors on Rails Apache Installs
This isn't a benchmark, but it's a great way to send a lot of requests to your box and check if there's anything wrong with your FastCGI setup:
for url in `cat urlslist.txt`; do COUNTER=0 while [ $COUNTER -lt 2 ]; do echo -n ${COUNTER}- curl --silent --user yourUSER:yourPASS $url | grep "Internal" let COUNTER=COUNTER+1 done done