ApacheBench is one of the most common programs used to benchmark web servers.
By default apachebench will run using HTTP/1.0 requests and without compression enabled even if the tested server supports that.

For example:

ab -n 1 -v 4 "http://www.ducea.com/"
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev < $Revision: 1.141 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking www.ducea.com (be patient)...
INFO: POST header ==
---
GET / HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: ApacheBench/2.0.41-dev
Host: www.ducea.com
Accept: */*
---
LOG: header received:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 21:55:53 GMT
Server: Apache
Status: 200 OK
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

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