jmeter scripts to test server performance

We've found jmeter to be very useful in determining server performance, but it can be a bit daunting to get started. I've uploaded a couple files that might help to our launchpad project (http://launchpad.net/pantheon/jmeter). They're fairly simple now but I'm very interested in ideas/code/suggestions to make these much better at testing day-to-day performance of a drupal/pressflow server.

Here are some basic instructions to get started:

1) Install jmeter
a) one with a good network connection to the server to test (ie: if your server is on AWS, install on a server in the same region).
b) preferably on a separate server than the one you will be testing.

2) make sure jmetergraph.pl is in $JMETER_HOME/bin

3) create a $JMETER_HOME/tests dir and place the *.jmx files into it

4) You can edit and use the small_instance.sh and large_instance.sh to fire off the preferred test and print the graphs.

Currently there are 3 jmx files:

1) default.jmx. I would like to add support for a pre-defined range of nodes to replicate the ability of siege

2) post_data.jmx. A first attempt at getting jmeter to test authenticated_user performance. Ideally, I would like to wrap this functionality into default.jmx

3) speed.jmx. Just hammer until it cries - probably not very useful in the long run

*.jmx files can be edited by hand or using jmeter on a system with a gui.