# 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 of  siege can be obtained via  anonymous FTP:
http://download.joedog.org/siege/siege-latest.tar.gz

The source repository is located on GitHub:
git clone https://github.com/JoeDog/siege.git

You can view in your browser here:
https://github.com/JoeDog/siege

Updates and announcements are distributed via JoeDog: 
http://www.joedog.org/



INSTALLATION
------------
Siege was built with  GNU  autoconf. If you are familiar with
GNU software, then you should be  comfortable  installing siege
Please consult the file INSTALL for more details.

PREREQUISITES
-------------
To enable HTTPS support, you must install both openssl and
openssl-devel on  your system. 

To enable gzip transfer encoding, you will need both zlib and 
zlib-devel installed on your system.

All prerequisites must be installed at compile time. If you add
the libraries after siege has been compiled, you will have to 
run ./configure, make and make install again.

Siege prereqs are not dependencies. If these libraries are not 
present, the application will still compile and function. It 
simply won't contain these functionalities.


DOCUMENTATION
-------------
Documentation is available in man pages  siege(1) layingsiege(1)
An html manual is included with this distribution:   manual.html

Complete documentation for siege can be found at www.joedog.org


LICENSE
-------
Consult the file COPYING for complete license information.
 
Copyright (C) 2000-2009 by Jeffrey Fulmer <jeff@joedog.org>
 
Permission is  granted  to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
copies  of  this  document as received,  in any medium, provided 
that  the  copyright  notice  and  this  permission  notice  are 
preserved,  thus giving the recipient permission to redistribute 
in turn.
 
Permission  is  granted  to distribute modified versions of this
document,  or  of portions of it,  under  the above  conditions,
provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last
changed them.
 
In addition, as a special exception, the  copyright holders give
permission to link the code of portions of this program with the
OpenSSL  library  under certain  conditions as described in each
individual  source  file,  and  distribute  linked  combinations
including the two.

You must  obey the  GNU General Public License  in all  respects
for all of the code  used  other  than OpenSSL.  If  you  modify
file(s)  with  this exception,  you may extend this exception to 
your version of the file(s), but you are not obligated to do so.  
If you do  not wish  to do so,  delete this exception  statement 
from your version. If you delete  this exception  statement from 
all source files in the program, then also delete it here.  
