Provided by: siege_4.0.4-1build1_amd64 
NAME
siege - An 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:
-c 25
-c25
Long options look like this:
--concurrent=25
Option Values
-V, --version
Displays the siege release version and copyright information.
-h, --help
Prints a help message describing siege's command-line options.
-C, --config
Prints a detailed summary of all the currently configured options, most of which are sent in
$HOME/.siege/siege.conf
-v, --vebose
This directive puts siege into verbose mode which is actually a default setting. This command-line
option is useful when the config file is set to 'verbose = false' since it will allow you to override
that.
By default siege's verbose output is displayed in a color-coded style.
* HTTP 2xx is coded blue
* HTTP 3xx is coded cyan
* HTTP 4xx is coded magenta
* HTTP 5xx is coded red
* HTTP cached is coded black
NOTE: You can turn off color in siege.conf like this: 'color = off'
-q, --quiet
This directive silences siege. It is mostly used for scripting and is often used in conjunction with
-g/--get. You can detect the success or failure of the run with its exit code.
siege --quiet -g www.joedog.org
if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then
echo "Success"
else
echo "Failure"
fi
-g URL, --get=URL
This option allows you to request a URL and watch the header transaction. There is a corresponding
config file directive that allows you to set the request method for these requests: gmethod =
HEAD|GET
$ 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
NOTE: It's best practice to quote the URL when it's passed to siege from the the command-line.
-p URL, --print=URL
This option is similar to -g / --get but it PRINTS the page it received from the server.
$ siege -p http://www.joedog.org/
GET / HTTP/1.0
Host: www.joedog.org
Accept: */*
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (unknown-x86_64-linux-gnu) Siege/4.0.3rc1
Connection: close
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2016 16:58:13 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Location: https://www.joedog.org/
Server: cloudflare-nginx
Connection: close
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="https://www.joedog.org/">here</a>.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache/2.2.31 (Amazon) Server at www.joedog.org Port 80</address>
</body></html>
-c NUM, --concurrent=NUM
This option allows you to set the concurrent number of users. The total number of users is
technically limited to your computer's resources.
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.
-r NUM, --reps=NUM|once
This option tells each siege user how times it should run. The value should generally be a number
greater than zero but it may be the keyword 'once'.
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>
-t NUMm, --time=NUMm
This option is similar to --reps but instead of specifying the number of times each user should run,
it specifies the amount of time each should run.
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.
-d NUM, --delay=NUM
This option instructs siege how long to delay between each page request. The value NUM represents
the number of seconds between each one. This number can be a decimal value. In fact the default is
half a second (--delay=0.5).
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.
-b, --benchmark
This directive tells siege to go into benchmark mode. This means there is no delay between
iterations.
-i, --internet
This option sets siege into what we call internet mode. It makes requests from the urls.txt file
(see: -f <file> / --file=<file>) in random order.
-f FILE, --file=FILE
This option tells siege to work with a list of urls inside a text file. The URLs are listed one per
line. Unlike URLs that are passed as a command-line argument, the URLs in this file should not be
quoted.
siege's urls.txt parser supports comments and variables.
-R FILE, --rc=FILE
This directive allows you to set an alternative resource file. By default, the siegerc file is
$HOME/.siege/siege.conf With this directive, you can override the default and use an alternative
file.
-L FILE, --log=FILE
The default log file is $prefix/var/log/siege.log. This directive allows you to specify and
alternative file for logging.
-m "string", --mark="string"
This option allows you to log a message to the log file before your stats are written there. It is
generally used to identify the proceeding run. You could, for example, mark the file with your
command-line parameters so it's understood what configuration generated the following data.
-H "header: value", --header="Header: value"
This options allows you to set a custom header in the request. Generally speaking, this request will
override an existing header. The Cookie header is a special case. If you set -H "Cookie: value" then
siege will send that cookie in addition to the other ones.
-A "string", --agent="string"
This option allows you to override the default user-agent with a custom one.
siege --agent="JoeDog Jr. in da hizzle"
Will set this header:
User-agent: JoeDog Jr. in da hizzle
Alternatively, you could set the User-agent with the -H/--header option above.
-T "text", --content-type="text"
This is another set header shortcut. You use this option to override the default Content-type request
header.
--no-parser
Turn off the HTML parser. When siege downloads a page, it parses it for additional page elements such
as style-sheets, javascript and images. It will make additional requests for any elements it finds.
With this option enabled, siege will stop after it pulls down the main page.
--no-follow
This directive instructs siege not to follow 3xx redirects.
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.
An RFC 1738 URL looks like this:
<scheme>://<username>:<password>@<hostname>:<port>/<path>;<params>?<query>#<frag>
A siege URL with a method idicator looks like this:
<scheme>://<username>:<password>@<hostname>:<port>/<path> POST <query>
You can also post the contents of a file using the redirect character like this:
<scheme>://<username>:<password>@<hostname>:<port>/<path> POST </home/jeff/haha.txt
Here's two examples with the siege method indicator:
http://www.joedog.org/ POST haha=papa&dada=mama
ftp://ftp.armstrong.com/ PUT </home/jdfulmer/etc/tests/bbc.jpg
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:
[scheme://] host.domain.xxx [:port] [/path/file]
When siege receives a host name it builds the URL with default assumptions. www.joedog.org becomes
http://www.joedog.org:80/
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.
The format for the file is one URL per line:
https://www.joedog.org/
https://www.joedog.org/haha/
https://www.joedog.org/haha/ POST homer=simpson&marge=doestoo
The file also supports UNIX-style commenting:
# Comment looks like this
https://www.joedog.org/
https://www.joedog.org/haha/
https://www.joedog.org/haha/ POST homer=simpson&marge=doestoo
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:
SCHEME=https
HOST=bart.joedog.org
$(SCHEME)://$(HOST)/
$(SCHEME)://$(HOST)/haha/
$(SCHEME)://$(HOST)/haha/ POST homer=simpson&marge=doestoo
You can tell siege about this file with the -f/--file option:
siege -c1 -r50 -f /home/jeff/urls.txt
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@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@joedog.org>
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.
AVAILABILITY
The most recent released version of siege is available by HTTP download:
http://download.joedog.org/pub/siege
SEE ALSO
siege.config(1) bombardment(1) siege2csv(1)