Siege [0], is my go-to. Easy to add to CI, because its on most platforms, and has decent output configs. You can vary headers and pages to hit, and how long connections get held open, or just reject them. And of course, it has great concurrency.
It can bring down most servers that aren't configured to prevent DOS attacks, like naive nginx or Apache configs. Usually somewhere between 5-10mins.
a long long long time ago (~2009) i used jmeter. it spawns aws instances and pegs your website in ways of your choosing. by now I am sure they got something even more advanced
When I was on the front page of HN, IIRC it meant about 5k visits in an hour. How can such a low number kill a webpage... Or do other on the front page experience much higher traffic?