Introduction

Siege is a load testing and benchmarking tool for Linux, designed for web developers to evaluate how well an application holds up under stress. It can be configured to perform concurrent access by multiple users against a web site, recording the response time of every request for each user, and repeating this under a given number of concurrent users. It supports multiple connections as well as GET and POST requests.

Installation

  • Mac OSX
    1
    brew install siege
  • Ubuntu
    1
    aptitude install siege

Parameters

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
-c:  Simulate N concurrent users accessing the target

-r:  Repeat the test run N times

-t:  Duration of the test run. The default unit is minutes, e.g. 5s (5 seconds) or 5 (5 minutes).
# -r and -t are generally not used together

-f:  The URL list for the workload

-i:  Randomly access URLs from the url.txt file specified by -f, in order to simulate real access patterns (randomness)

-b:  Run a stress test with no delay between requests (delay=0)

-A:  Specify the User-Agent for the requests
-H:  Specify a Header for the requests
-T:  Specify the Content-Type for the requests

siege -c 200 -r 100 http://www.google.com
siege -c 200 -r 100 -f urls.txt
siege -c 200 -r 100 -f urls.txt -i
siege -c 200 -r 100 -f urls.txt -i -b delay=0, a more accurate stress test rather than a functional test
siege -H "Content-Type:application/json" -c 200 -r 100 -f urls.txt -i -b

Result Explanation

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Transactions:		            20 hits            # Total number of tests performed
Availability:		            100.00 %           # Success ratio
Elapsed time:		            1.52 secs          # Total time elapsed
Data transferred:	            0.80 MB            # Total data transferred
Response time:		            0.14 secs          # Response time
Transaction rate:	            13.16 trans/sec    # Requests processed per second
Throughput:		            0.52 MB/sec        # Throughput rate
Concurrency:		            1.82               # Highest concurrency
Successful transactions:            20                 # Number of successful requests
Failed transactions:                0                  # Number of failed requests
Longest transaction:                0.51               # Longest time for a single transaction
Shortest transaction:               0.05               # Shortest time for a single transaction

Tips

When sending a POST request, the URL format is: http://www.xxxx.com/ POST p1=v1&p2=v2

If the URL contains spaces or non-ASCII characters, it must be encoded first.