Testing Performance with Siege

Setting up Siege

If we’re building a web app, we’ve probably wondered how well it performs under load. While several tools can help us figure this out, Siege is one of the most flexible. It has an interface similar to curl, and we can automate it.

Don’t run Siege against servers we don’t manage. Use it to stress-test our stuff. We’ll use the Notes API for this.

Install Siege on Ubuntu with apt:

$ sudo apt install siege

Using siege on notes API

To use Siege with its default values, give it a URL:

$ siege http://localhost:3000/notes

siege makes concurrent connections to our API over and over until we tell it to stop by pressing Ctrl+c.

When we do, siege generates a report on the screen. Press Ctrl+c when the terminal below executes.