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