Squid Throughput/Performance Testing

Hi all.

I'm interested in the performance of squid, and in particular, how do
the developers optimise/benchmark/stress-test the code - I'd like to
use similar ideas for evaluation.

Any hints/tips that you can recomend on a low budget? I've looked at
Web Polygraph, and in a lab environment this seems excellent, but I
think it requires more hardware than I have available to me.

Your help is appreciated.

Regards

--
Brad.