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https://github.com/JoeDog/siege

Siege is an http load tester and benchmarking utility
https://github.com/JoeDog/siege

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Siege is an http load tester and benchmarking utility

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# Siege



WHAT IS IT?

-----------

Siege is an open source regression test and benchmark utility. 

It can stress test a single URL with a user defined number of 

simulated users, or it can  read  many URLs into memory and 

stress them simultaneously. The program reports the total 

number of hits recorded, bytes transferred, response time, 

concurrency, and return status. Siege supports HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 

protocols, the GET and POST directives, cookies, transaction 

logging, and basic authentication. Its features are configurable 

on a per user basis.



Most features are configurable with command line options which

also include default values to minimize the complexity of the 

program's invocation.  Siege allows  you  to stress a web server 

with  n number of users t number of times, where n and t are 

defined by the user. It records the duration time of the test

as well as the duration of each single transaction. It reports

the number of transactions, elapsed time, bytes transferred,

response time, transaction rate, concurrency and the number of

times the server responded OK, that is status code 200. 



Siege was designed and implemented by Jeffrey Fulmer in his 

position as Webmaster for Armstrong World Industries. It  was

modeled in part after Lincoln Stein's torture.pl and it's data

reporting is almost identical. But torture.pl does not allow 

one to stress many URLs simultaneously; out of that need siege

was born....



When a HTTP server is being hit by the program, it is said to be 

"under siege."



WHY DO I NEED IT?

-----------------

Siege was written for both web developers and web systems admin-

istrators. It allows those individuals to test their programs 

and  their systems under duress. As a web professional, you are 

responsible for the intregrity of your product, yet you have no 

control over who accesses it. Traffic spikes can occur at any 

moment. How do you know if you're prepared?



Siege will allow you to place those programs under duress, to 

allow you  to  better  understand the load that they can with 

stand. You'll sleep  better knowing your site can withstand the 

weight of 400 simultaneous transactions if your site currently

peaks at 250.



A transaction is characterized by the server opening a socket

for the client, handling a request, serving data over the wire 

and closing the socket upon completion. It is important to note 

that HUMAN internet users take time to digest the data which

comes back to them. Siege users do not. In practice I've found

that 400 simultaneous siege users translates to at least five 

times that amount in real internet sessions. This is why siege

allows you to set a delay ( --delay=NUM ). When set, each siege

user sleeps for a random number  of seconds between 1 and NUM.

Through your server logs you should be able to get the average

amount of time spent on a page. It is recommended that you use 

that number for your delay when simulating internet activity.



WHERE IS IT?

------------

The latest version of  siege can be obtained via  anonymous FTP:

http://download.joedog.org/siege/siege-latest.tar.gz



The source repository is located on GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/JoeDog/siege.git



You can view in your browser here:

https://github.com/JoeDog/siege



Updates and announcements are distributed via JoeDog: 

http://www.joedog.org/



INSTALLATION

------------

Siege was built with  GNU  autoconf. If you are familiar with

GNU software, then you should be  comfortable  installing siege

Please consult the file INSTALL for more details.



PREREQUISITES

-------------

To enable HTTPS support, you must install both openssl and

openssl-devel on  your system. 



To enable gzip transfer encoding, you will need both zlib and 

zlib-devel installed on your system.



All prerequisites must be installed at compile time. If you add

the libraries after siege has been compiled, you will have to 

run ./configure, make and make install again.



Siege prereqs are not dependencies. If these libraries are not 

present, the application will still compile and function. It 

simply won't contain these functionalities.



DOCUMENTATION

-------------

Documentation is available in man pages  siege(1) layingsiege(1)

An html manual is included with this distribution:   manual.html



Complete documentation for siege can be found at www.joedog.org



LICENSE

-------

Consult the file COPYING for complete license information.

 

Copyright (C) 2000-2023 by Jeffrey Fulmer 

 

Permission is  granted  to anyone to make or distribute verbatim

copies  of  this  document as received,  in any medium, provided 

that  the  copyright  notice  and  this  permission  notice  are 

preserved,  thus giving the recipient permission to redistribute 

in turn.

 

Permission  is  granted  to distribute modified versions of this

document,  or  of portions of it,  under  the above  conditions,

provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last

changed them.

 

In addition, as a special exception, the  copyright holders give

permission to link the code of portions of this program with the

OpenSSL  library  under certain  conditions as described in each

individual  source  file,  and  distribute  linked  combinations

including the two.



You must  obey the  GNU General Public License  in all  respects

for all of the code  used  other  than OpenSSL.  If  you  modify

file(s)  with  this exception,  you may extend this exception to 

your version of the file(s), but you are not obligated to do so.  

If you do  not wish  to do so,  delete this exception  statement 

from your version. If you delete  this exception  statement from 

all source files in the program, then also delete it here.