Another tool I have been using on my personal project is wrk [1]. It's pretty simple to use and can generate thousands of connections with multiple threads.

[1]: https://github.com/wg/wrk

There's a branch from Gil Tene (Azul) that fixes wrk for the coordinated omission problem, which he explains in the readme of that same repo[1].

[1] https://github.com/giltene/wrk2