Siege is an HTTP load testing and benchmarking utility. It helps you test you server and web developments in high load situations. Quoted from it’s home page:
Siege is an http load testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It lets its user hit a web server with a configurable number of simulated web browsers. Those browsers place the server “under siege.”
To install it in Ubuntu just use the repositories:
sudo apt-get install siege
In Mac OS X using MacPorts:
sudo port install siege
And using brew:
sudo brew install siege
If you don’t use either of them you’ll have to download and compile the source code. It’s as easy as running those commands that will install the binary files in /usr/local/bin folder:
curl -O http://download.joedog.org/siege/siege-latest.tar.gz tar xzvpf siege-latest.tar.gz cd `ls -1d */ | grep siege- | sort -r | head -1` ./configure make sudo make install
Note: That “strange” cd command moves you into the folders extracted from siege-latest.tar.gz. As it could have any version number we get the list of all folders starting with siege-, then sort in reverse order and get the first one.
Use siege.config to create a .siegerc file in your home folder with the default configuration:
$ siege.config New configuration template added to /Users/user/.siegerc Run siege -C to view the current settings in that file
Then you can list it’s options using the -C parameter of siege:
$ siege -C CURRENT SIEGE CONFIGURATION Mozilla/5.0 (apple-x86_64-darwin13.3.0) Siege/3.0.6 Edit the resource file to change the settings. ---------------------------------------------- version: 3.0.6 verbose: true quiet: false debug: false protocol: HTTP/1.1 get method: HEAD connection: close concurrent users: 15 time to run: n/a repetitions: n/a socket timeout: 30 accept-encoding: gzip delay: 1 sec internet simulation: false benchmark mode: false failures until abort: 1024 named URL: none URLs file: /usr/local/etc/urls.txt logging: true log file: /usr/local/var/siege.log resource file: /Users/user/.siegerc timestamped output: false comma separated output: false allow redirects: true allow zero byte data: true allow chunked encoding: true upload unique files: true
Now that siege is installed you can start testing a web site:
siege -c5 -d5 -r1 -v http://www.test.com
In this example I used:
-c5to define the number of concurrent users-d5to define the delay between each user request-r1to define number of repetitions
The result of the command is something like this:
** SIEGE 3.0.6 ** Preparing 5 concurrent users for battle. The server is now under siege... HTTP/1.1 200 0.14 secs: 7706 bytes ==> GET / HTTP/1.1 200 0.16 secs: 7706 bytes ==> GET / HTTP/1.1 200 0.11 secs: 7706 bytes ==> GET / HTTP/1.1 200 0.11 secs: 7706 bytes ==> GET / HTTP/1.1 200 0.11 secs: 7706 bytes ==> GET / done. Transactions: 5 hits Availability: 100.00 % Elapsed time: 4.12 secs Data transferred: 0.04 MB Response time: 0.13 secs Transaction rate: 1.21 trans/sec Throughput: 0.01 MB/sec Concurrency: 0.15 Successful transactions: 5 Failed transactions: 0 Longest transaction: 0.16 Shortest transaction: 0.11
But this command only tests one URL in your server, the one you give as parameter. To make a more real world test you can use the logparse Perl script to create your own urls.txt file. This program collects URLs from Apache style access logs and populates a urls.txt file to use it later with siege. The parameters needed are the web site you want to generate the URLs for and an access_log file from the Apache server:
perl logparse -h http://test.com -f /opt/local/apache2/logs/test.com-access_log
Once you have the urls.txt file you can use it in siege with the -f option:
siege -c5 -d5 -r1 -f=urls.txt -v http://www.test.com