Siege (software)

{{Infobox software

| name = Siege

| developer = Jeffrey Fulmer, et al

| released =

| latest release version = 3.0.9

| repo = {{URL|github.com/JoeDog/siege/}}

| language = English

| genre = Load testing

| license = GPLv3{{cite web | url=https://github.com/JoeDog/siege/blob/master/COPYING | title=Siege | website=GitHub | date=17 May 2022 }} or later

| website = {{URL|joedog.org/siege-home}}

}}

Siege is a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and HTTPS load testing and web server benchmarking utility developed by Jeffrey Fulmer. It was designed to let web developers measure the performance of their code under stress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet.

It is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) open-source software license, which means it is free to use, modify, and distribute.[http://www.techrepublic.com/article/test-your-web-server-lay-siege-to-it/ Test your Web server: Lay Siege to it!], Tech Republic

Siege can stress a single URL or it can read many URLs into memory and stress them simultaneously. It supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols.[https://public.grokola.com/#search/guid/solution/0e0bdf7a-93a7-48c7-b2b7-9b8bcc20fd6b Load Testing and Benchmarking With Siege]

Performance measures

Performance measures include elapsed time of the test, the amount of data transferred (including headers), the response time of the server, its transaction rate, its throughput, its concurrency and the number of times it returned OK. These measures are quantified and reported at the end of each run.

This is a sample of siege output:

Ben: $ siege -u shemp.whoohoo.com/Admin.jsp -d1 -r10 -c25

..Siege 2.65 2006/05/11 23:42:16

..Preparing 25 concurrent users for battle.

The server is now under siege...done

Transactions: 250 hits

Elapsed time: 14.67 secs

Data transferred: 448,000 bytes

Response time: 0.43 secs

Transaction rate: 17.04 trans/sec

Throughput: 30538.51 bytes/sec

Concurrency: 7.38

Status code 200: 250

Successful transactions: 250

Failed transactions: 0

Siege has essentially three modes of operation: regression, internet simulation and brute force. It can read a large number of URLs from a configuration file and run through them incrementally (regression) or randomly (internet simulation). Or the user may simply pound a single URL with a runtime configuration at the command line (brute force).

Platform support

Siege was written on Linux and has been successfully ported to AIX, BSD, HP-UX, and Solaris. It compiles on most UNIX System V variants and on most newer BSD systems.[http://www.joedog.org/siege-home/ Joe Dog Software]

References