Install Siege

Siege is an HTTP load testing and bench-marking 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. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. It lets its user hit a server with a configurable number of simulated clients. Those clients place the server “under siege.”

For more information, visit the Siege Home web page.

Siege was written on GNU/Linux and has been successfully ported to AIX, BSD, HP-UX and Solaris. It should compile on most System V UNIX variants and on most newer BSD systems. Because Siege relies on POSIX.1b features not supported by Microsoft, it will not run on Windows. Of course you can use Siege to test a Windows server.

1. Download the source code:

   cd /tmp
   wget http://download.joedog.org/siege/siege-latest.tar.gz

2. Extract the archive file:

   tar -xvf siege-latest.tar.gz

3. Change to the directory containing the source code:

   cd siege-*

4. Configure and compile the source code:

   sudo apt-get -y install build-essential
   # On RHEL based Linux systems, use: yum install make glibc-devel gcc patch
    
   ./configure
   make
   sudo make install

5. Tweak system configuration for maximum concurrancy:

   cp /etc/sysctl.conf /tmp/
    
   cat >> /tmp/sysctl.conf << EOF
    
   ##############################################################
   # Improve System Performance Under High Load
   #
    
   # Increase size of file handles and inode cache
   fs.file-max = 2097152
    
   # Do less swapping
   vm.swappiness = 10
   vm.dirty_ratio = 60
   vm.dirty_background_ratio = 2
    
   # Number of times SYNACKs for passive TCP connection.
   net.ipv4.tcp_synack_retries = 2
    
   # Allowed local port range
   net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 2000 65535
    
   # Protect Against TCP Time-Wait
   net.ipv4.tcp_rfc1337 = 1
    
   # Decrease the time default value for tcp_fin_timeout connection
   net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout = 15
    
   # Decrease the time default value for connections to keep alive
   net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time = 300
   net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_probes = 5
   net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_intvl = 15
    
   # Default Socket Receive Buffer
   net.core.rmem_default = 31457280
    
   # Maximum Socket Receive Buffer
   net.core.rmem_max = 12582912
    
   # Default Socket Send Buffer
   net.core.wmem_default = 31457280
    
   # Maximum Socket Send Buffer
   net.core.wmem_max = 12582912
    
   # Increase number of incoming connections
   net.core.somaxconn = 4096
    
   # Increase number of incoming connections backlog
   net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 65536
    
   # Increase the maximum amount of option memory buffers
   net.core.optmem_max = 25165824
    
   # Increase the maximum total buffer-space allocatable
   net.ipv4.tcp_mem = 65536 131072 262144
   net.ipv4.udp_mem = 65536 131072 262144
    
   # Increase the read-buffer space allocatable
   net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 8192 87380 16777216
   net.ipv4.udp_rmem_min = 16384
    
   # Increase the write-buffer-space allocatable
   net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 8192 65536 16777216
   net.ipv4.udp_wmem_min = 16384
    
   # Increase the tcp-time-wait buckets pool size to prevent simple DOS attacks
   net.ipv4.tcp_max_tw_buckets = 1440000
   net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle = 1
   net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse = 1
    
   EOF
    
   sudo cp /tmp/sysctl.conf /etc/
    
   sudo sysctl -p