Using Siege to Stress Test an Application
Recently the company I work for migrated to new servers. Specifically a migration from physical boxes to VMs. During this migration we were all fairly confident that our architecture would work and would be able to sustain considerable traffic. What is considerable traffic? In all honesty none of us even our consultants could say for sure. In order to test the system we needed to test with our applications running and getting real world data with out actually impacting our users. In researching this I found there were two tools that seem to keep showing up. The first was Jmeter, the second was Siege. If you have access to a linux box I highly recommend siege over Jmeter for simple stress testing. Siege turned out to be easy to use, configure, and run. So here is a little information on how to get started with siege and run some test against you application. Installing Siege Mac OSX Open Terminal Download the latest version of siege ( 3.0.6 – current) http://download.joedog.o