siege (1) - Linux Manuals
NAME
siege is a HTTP/FTP load tester and benchmarking utility.
SYNOPSIS
siege [options] siege [options] <URL> siege [options] -g <URL> siege [options] -f urls.txt
DESCRIPTION
siege is a multi-threaded HTTP/FTP load tester and benchmarking utility. It supports most of the features detailed in RFCs 2616 (HTTP) and 959 (FTP). Properties can be set at both from the command line and in a configuration file. When the same propertie is set in both locations, the command line takes precedent.The default configuration file is $HOME/.siege/siege.conf If you don't have a $HOME/.siege directory and a siege.conf and cookies.txt file, siege will generate a new config directory when it runs. You can generate your configu directory with the following command: siege.config
OPTIONS
Option Syntax
siege supports long and short options. Short options look like this:
Long options look like this:
By default siege's verbose output is displayed in a color-coded
style.
NOTE: You can turn off color in siege.conf like this: 'color = off'
NOTE: It's best practice to quote the URL when it's passed to siege
from the the command-line.
You should not configure more users than your web server is configured
to handle. For example, the default apache configuration is capped at
255 threads. If you run siege with -c 1024, then 769 siege users are
left waiting for an apache handler.
For this reason, the default siege configuration is capped at 255 users.
You can increase that number inside siege.conf but if you make a mess,
then please don't complain to us.
If --reps=3 then each siege user will run three times before it exits.
However, if --reps=once, then each user will run through the urls.txt
file exactly one time.
For more information about the urls.txt file, see option -f <file>,
--file=<file>
The value format is ``NUMm'', where ``NUM'' is an amount of time and the ``m''
modifier is either S, M, or H for seconds, minutes and hours. To run
siege for an hour, you could select any one of the following
combinations: -t3600S, -t60M, -t1H. The modifier is not case sensitive,
but it does require no space between the number and itself.
The time between delay requests is NOT applied toward the transaction
time. If two 0.1 second transactions have a 2 second delay between them,
their average transaction time is run is 0.1 seconds. It is applied
toward the total elapsed time. In this scenario, the elapsed time would
be 2.2 seconds.
NOTE: when the parser is enabled (see: -p/--parser), there is no delay
between the page and its elements, i.e., style sheets, javascripts, etc.
The delay is only between page requests.
siege's urls.txt parser supports comments and variables.
Will set this header:
Alternatively, you could set the User-agent with the -H/--header option
above.
An RFC 1738 URL looks like this:
A siege URL with a method idicator looks like this:
You can also post the contents of a file using the redirect character
like this:
Here's two examples with the siege method indicator:
NOTE: If you set URLs with method indicators at the command-line, then
you MUST quote the thing or your shell will treat it like three separate
arguments. If the URL is in a urls.txt file, then you shouldn't quote it.
As mentioned above, siege goes to great lengths to allow commonly
used shortcuts that you're used to from most browser implementations.
It treats many parts of the 1738 URL as optional. In this example, the
parts in brackets are optional:
When siege receives a host name it builds the URL with default
assumptions. www.joedog.org becomes http://www.joedog.org:80/
The format for the file is one URL per line:
The file also supports UNIX-style commenting:
It supports shell-style variable declaration and references. This is
convenient if you want to run the same test on two different tiers or
two different shemes:
You can tell siege about this file with the -f/--file option:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Option Values
siege --quiet -g www.joedog.org
if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then
echo "Success"
else
echo "Failure"
fi
$ siege -g "https://www.joedog.org/"
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
Host: www.joedog.org
Accept: */*
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (unknown-x86_64-linux-gnu) Siege/4.0.0-beta5
Connection: close
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: cloudflare-nginx
Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2016 18:18:41 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: close
Last-Modified: Wed, 25 Nov 2015 18:46:08 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=3, must-revalidate
Expires: Tue, 09 Feb 2016 18:18:44 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
CF-RAY: 27219407eeff084a-IAD
siege --agent="JoeDog Jr. in da hizzle"
User-agent: JoeDog Jr. in da hizzle
URL FORMAT
siege supports RFC 1738 URL formats but it takes pains to implement
commonly used shortcuts for your convenience. In addition to RFC 1738
formats, siege introduces its own URL format to indicate protocol method.
URLS.txt FILE
From the section called Option Syntax above we learn that siege
can take a URL as an argument. siege -c -r2 www.joedog.org will
request the JoeDog index page twice. But what if you want to hit
large portions of the site? siege will allow you to fill a file
with URLs so that it can run through list.
SCHEME=https
HOST=bart.joedog.org
$(SCHEME)://$(HOST)/
$(SCHEME)://$(HOST)/haha/
$(SCHEME)://$(HOST)/haha/ POST homer=simpson&marge=doestoo
PERFORMANCE STATISTICS
When its run is complete, siege will gather performance data from all
its clients and summarize them after the run. (You can also choose to
log these numbers). The command-line output is modeled after Lincoln
Stein's torture.pl script:
Transactions: 2000 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 58.57 secs
Data transferred: 5.75 MB
Response time: 0.25 secs
Transaction rate: 34.15 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.10 MB/sec
Concurrency: 8.45
Successful transactions: 2000
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 4.62
Shortest transaction: 0.00
Transactions
This number represents the total number of HTTP requests. In this
example, we ran 25 simulated users [-c25] and each ran ten times
[-r10]. Twenty-five times ten equals 250 so why is the transaction
total 2000? That's because siege counts every request. This run
included a META redirect, a 301 redirect and the page it requested
contained several elements that were also downloaded.
Availability
This is the percentage of socket connections successfully handled
by the server. It is the result of socket failures (including
timeouts) divided by the sum of all connection attempts. This
number does not include 400 and 500 level server errors which are
recorded in "Failed transactions" described below.
Elapsed time
The duration of the entire siege test. This is measured from the
time the user invokes siege until the last simulated user
completes its transactions. Shown above, the test took 14.67
seconds to complete.
Data transferred
The sum of data transferred to every siege simulated user. It
includes the header information as well as content. Because it
includes header information, the number reported by siege will
be larger then the number reported by the server. In internet
mode, which hits random URLs in a configuration file, this
number is expected to vary from run to run.
Response time
The average time it took to respond to each simulated user's requests.
Transaction rate
The average number of transactions the server was able to handle
per second, in a nutshell: it is the count of all transactions
divided by elapsed time.
Throughput
The average number of bytes transferred every second from the
server to all the simulated users.
Concurrency
This is the average number of simultaneous connections. The metric
is calculated like this: the sum of all transaction times divided
by elapsed time (how long siege ran)
Successful transactions
The number of times the server responded with a return code < 400.
Failed transactions
The number of times the socket transactions failed which includes
socket timeouts.
Longest transaction
The greatest amount of time that any single transaction took, out
of all transactions.
Shortest transaction
The smallest amount of time that any single transaction took, out
of all transactions.
AUTHOR
Jeffrey Fulmer, et al. <jeff [at] joedog.org> is the primary author of siege. Numerous people
throughout the globe also contributed to this program. Their
contributions are noted in the source code ChangeLog
COPYRIGHT
Copyright by Jeffrey Fulmer, et al. <jeff [at] joedog.org>
AVAILABILITY
The most recent released version of siege is available by HTTP
download: