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Load test your website with Siege

Stress

Article from ADMIN 72/2022

By Ali Imran Nagori

A stress and benchmarking tool for websites controlled from the command line.

Monitoring the performance of a website and fixing performance issues is a day-to-day job for sys admins. Ignoring this part of the job could result in the loss of potential customers. Siege is an open source benchmarking tool that can greatly help you in this regard. Benchmarking tools [1] perform standardized tests for accessing the relative capabilities of hardware or software and evaluating their results.

Raison d'Stress

Siege puts your website under different stress conditions and then evaluates the following performance parameters, among others:

Availability of the server
Response time
Number of successful and failed transactions
Throughput

Siege developers define each parameter, which I talk about later in this article. Before getting your hands dirty, though, please read the "Important Note" box.

Important Note

Running Siege against third-party websites and servers without the consent of the owner is an illegal practice. Siege has a distributed denial-of-service (DDoSing) effect; as such, it can bring down a running server. This article is written only for educational purposes, and you alone are responsible for any damage caused by any misuse of this software.

Although running Siege does not require much expert knowledge, interpreting its result is what you should care about, and I will try to make that part simple. Running Siege requires sudo privileges, so be sure you have administrative access to your system. In this article, I provide instructions on how to use the Siege benchmarking tool to stress test a website hosted on an Ubuntu 20.04 server.