I am not much of a sysadmin. So the process of building from source (configure and make) remains intimidating. I do what most people would do – went to Google and searched for “installing siege on mac os x”.

One result looked promising. I attempted to run Step 1 on the command line. Error. If Step 1 fails, move on.

To step back, siege is an http load testing and benchmarking utility. Lately I've taken a strong interest in benchmarking my web applications. Mainly because I am developing APIs and using WordPress (which is notorious for being slow under server load). Although ab (Apache Benchmark) comes bundled with apache (which is pre-installed on Mac OS X), I've been hearing a lot about siege at conferences. As any good developer should, I wanted to tinker with it myself.

Installing siege

1. Open the Terminal app

2. Download the latest version of siege (currently 2.70)

   1curl -C - -O http://download.joedog.org/siege/siege-latest.tar.gz

3. Extract the tarball

   1tar -xvf siege-latest.tar.gz

4. Change directories to the extracted directory (again, currently siege-2.70)

   1cd siege-2.70/

5. Run the following commands (one at a time) to build and install siege. If you have an older version of siege read the INSTALL file for more instructions.

   1./configure
   2make
   3make install

This installed siege to /usr/local/bin/. This should already be in your PATH, so type:

1siege

You may be presented with a message that instructs you to generate a siege configuration file. If so, follow the on screen instructions.

Benchmarking with siege

The following sends a 10 requests across 10 concurrent connections for benchmarking (no delay between requests).

1siege -c 10 -r 10 -b /

If you want to learn more about configuring or using siege type siege -h or visit the siege manual.

Find this interesting? Let's continue the conversation on Twitter.