To benchmark a HTTP server, you can use the command-line utility Apache Bench (command ab).
If you have Python installed, you can start a HTTP server, e.g. running on port 10000, in any directory of your system. It will serve the files in that directory and sub-directories. Start it like this:
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 10000 Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 10000 ... |
To test the number of requests it can handle per second, you can use Apache Bench, which is invoked with the command ab:
$ ab -n2000 -c10 http://127.0.0.1:10000/ |
This will shoot off 2000 requests at the server, with a concurrency level of 10 (10 threads performing requests in parallel).