Speed testing your website with Siege Automatic

Installation via Homebrew

First, install homebrew using the instructions from https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/installation. Once installed you can simply install Siege in one command:

$ brew install siege

Using Siege

Now that Siege is installed we can begin speed testing your website. First thing to do is to create the siege config file in your home directory.

~ $ siege.config 

 
New configuration template added to /home/andrew/.siegerc
Run siege -C to view the current settings in that file

~ $ siege -c10 -d10 -r1 -v http://www.harish.com/ 

** SIEGE 2.72 

** Preparing 10 concurrent users for battle.  

The server is now under siege... 

HTTP/1.1 200 0.12 secs: 4123 bytes ==> / 

HTTP/1.1 200 0.11 secs: 4123 bytes ==> / 

HTTP/1.1 200 0.11 secs: 4123 bytes ==> / 

HTTP/1.1 200 0.12 secs: 4123 bytes ==> / 

HTTP/1.1 200 0.11 secs: 4123 bytes ==> / 

HTTP/1.1 200 0.13 secs: 4123 bytes ==> / 

HTTP/1.1 200 0.11 secs: 4123 bytes ==> / 

HTTP/1.1 200 0.11 secs: 4123 bytes ==> / 

HTTP/1.1 200 0.12 secs: 4123 bytes ==> / 

HTTP/1.1 200 0.11 secs: 4123 bytes ==> / 

done. 

Transactions: 10 hits Availability: 100.00 % Elapsed time: 8.12 secs Data transferred: 0.04 MB Response time: 0.11 secs Transaction rate: 1.23 trans/sec Throughput: 0.00 MB/sec Concurrency: 0.14 Successful transactions: 10 Failed transactions: 0 Longest transaction: 0.13 Shortest transaction: 0.11

Let’s break this down a little. First we entered the siege command with a number of parameters:

• -c10 is the number of concurrent users we want to simulate.
  

• -r1 is the number of repetitions, in this case, 1.
  

• -d10 is the delay between each user request (each siege simulated users sleeps for a random interval in seconds between 0 and 10).
  

-v is to show the output of each request.