Siege by Joe Dog Software is a great utility for quickly getting some useful data about the load handling capabilities of almost any web application. If you already have siege skip to the end where I lay out some usage tips.
If you need to Install Siege
Upgrade software (Debian apt):
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
On Debian you can simply:
wget http://download.joedog.org/siege/siege-latest.tar.gz
Extract the program:
tar -zxvf siege-latest.tar.gz
Change to Siege directory:
cd siege-*/
Configure and complete the install:
./configure make sudo make install
Generate a configuration file:
./siege.config
Let’s Run Siege
Running Siege is easy, try just the defaults along with your domain or IP address:
siege www.example.com
You should see some useful output. Now let’s set some variables and really stress the server. Two critical options that need to be set are the number of concurrent users (-c, default is 10) and the duration of the test in terms of either repetitive queries or time (-t). Let’s start with a simple example of 25 concurrent users for one minute.
siege -c25 -t1M www.example.com
** Siege 2.59 ** Preparing 25 concurrent users for battle. The server is now under siege... Lifting the server siege... done. Transactions: 406 hits Availability: 99.75 % Elapsed time: 59.66 secs Data transferred: 10340918 bytes Response time: 2.36 secs Transaction rate: 6.81 trans/sec Throughput: 173330.84 bytes/sec Concurrency: 16.07 Successful transactions: 412 Failed transactions: 1
Some of the other commonly used options for this would be –v (verbose) and –d to set a delay (the default is 0).
Another good tip is to use Siege to hit a number of pages on your website at random. Simply configure the program to read from a urls.txt file that lists the selected pages:
siege -f path/to/your/urls.txt
Happy sieging! Check out the official Siege manual for more information.
