Performance Benchmarking with Siege

I'm looking to do some performance testing against my blog (ptylr.com), so in looking for a suitable tool that can be installed, customised and left to run, I came across Siege (http://www.joedog.org/siege-home).

"Siege is an http load testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet."

I will configure Siege on-top of a standard CentOS6 virtual instance, firewall and SELinux have previously been disabled. The instance has Internet access. This example will use Siege v2.72.

In preparation for install, we need to ensure that mod_ssl and openssl have been installed. As we will be working and compiling source, we need to ensure that the appropriate compilers and installation tools are also installed. If these are already configured in your instance, you can ignore this step.

yum -y install mod_ssl openssl
yum -y install gcc automake autoconf libtool make

Now we download, configure and install Siege.

cd /home
curl -L http://www.joedog.org/pub/siege/siege-latest.tar.gz | tar xz
cd /home/siege-2.72/
./configure --with-ssl=/usr/bin/openssl
make && make install

Use the following to test the installation. Expect to receive the version number and copyright information.

siege -V

You can make amends to the default configuration file, but first copy it into the instance:

cp /home/siege-2.72/doc/siegerc ~/.siegerc

To run under default conditions, execute the following:

siege http://www.yourwebsite.com

To view the available configuration parameters, simply type siege at the comment prompt.