siege

# 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 o