Siege is a

Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

(HTTP) and

HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It uses encryption for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protoc ...

load testing Load testing is the process of putting demand on a structure or system and measuring its response. Software load testing Physical load testing Many types of machinery, engines, structures, and motors are load tested. The load may be at a de ...

and

web server benchmarking Web server benchmarking is the process of estimating a web server performance in order to find if the server can serve sufficiently high workload. Key parameters The performance is usually measured in terms of: *Number of requests that can be ser ...

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 The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

(GNU GPL)

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

license, which means it is free to use, modify, and distribute.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.Load Testing and Benchmarking With Siege
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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 Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and has been successfully ported to

AIX Aix or AIX may refer to: Computing * AIX, a line of IBM computer operating systems *Alternate index, for an IBM Virtual Storage Access Method key-sequenced data set * Athens Internet Exchange, a European Internet exchange point Places Belg ...

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is a proprietary software, proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise; current versions support HPE Integrity Servers, based on Intel's Itanium architect ...

, and

Solaris Solaris is the Latin word for sun. It may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Sol ...

. It compiles on most

UNIX System V Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

variants and on most newer BSD systems.Joe Dog Software
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References

{{Reflist, 30em Load testing tools Software testing