What is Siege?
Siege is an open source load testing and benchmarking utility designed specifically to test web applications. It allows developers to simulate a large number of concurrent users accessing a web application to test its performance and stability under heavy load.
Some key features of Siege include:
- Ability to simulate hundreds or thousands of concurrent users from a single machine
- Flexible configuration of user scenarios and access patterns
- Text-based output for statistics like response times, transaction rates, concurrence levels, and response status
- Authentication support with GET, POST, Basic Auth, Cookies, etc.
- SSL/TLS support
- Customizable HTTP header values
- Docker support for easier cloud deployments
- Scriptable using command files for automated tests
Siege is often used for capacity planning, benchmarking against alternative solutions, analyzing application bottlenecks, and monitoring web application performance over time. It is free and open source, available for Linux, Solaris, and macOS platforms.