David M Beazley, a very talented pythonista is gathering data for his talk at pycon. He's doing a little research on the GIL and has asked the community for some help.
You can see some interesting initial data on his test web page (the one whose server he is asking the community to slam).
If you'd like to contribute, just copy/paste this code into a python interpreter :)
import urllib2
count = 0
while True:
try:
f = urllib2.urlopen('http://ec2-174-129-96-143.compute-1.amazonaws.com/index.html')
count += 1
print count
except:
pass
Forgive my lazy exception handling. On occasion you'll get various networking errors as a result of the massive load his server is under like timeouts, or reset-by-peer type stuff. This isn't exactly mission critical code :)
Can't wait to hear his talk (I'm hoping to get it online since I won't be able to make it to pycon)