Unexpected surges in Web request traffic can exercise server-side resources (e.g., access bandwidth, processing, storage etc.) in undesirable ways. Administrators today do not have requisite tools to understand the impact of such "flash crowds" on their servers. Most Web servers either rely on over-provisioning and admission control, or use potentially expensive solutions like CDNs, to ensure high availability in the face of flash crowds. A more fine-grained understanding of the performance of individual server resources under emulated but realistic and controlled flash crowd-like conditions can aid administrators to make more efficient resource management decisions. In this paper, we present miniflash crowds (MFC)