I'm testing one web application with siege (http load tester and benchmarking utility) to estimate maximum traffic our webserver can handle. I find siege most capable and easy to use http stress test tool, although I noticed that it sometimes hangs up and there is no way to tell what is going on.

At first I thought siege might be waiting for some connections to timeout or something similar, however even after long period of time (hour or so) siege is still running without displaying results. I also checked that all related connection on remote machine are closed after a while, therefore test should be finished by the time. When I look at running processes, all siege threads and processes sleeps - apparently doing nothing.

I'm using latest siege release (3.0.5). Does anyone know what could cause the trouble?

Seen / tried If Siege supports HTTP/1.1 protocol why would I choose 1.0???

Sorry for the late response. I found this FAQ entry soon afterwards, but didn't manage to find a little bit of spare time to update initial post.

I'm not sure how to actually force HTTP 1.0. I didn't find any parameter for that in manual. Should I set it in custom header? I guess it could work, but then I'd have to create whole HTTP header myself, which doesn't work neither with explicit target URL nor without it (if it's already in header, it should work, right?).

I'm also confused by siege output. With default configuration it presumably use HTTP 1.1 (print HTTP 1.1 on screen), while invoked with --get (GET HTTP headers and display the transaction) it print HTTP 1.0. So which HTTP is actually used and when?

As a workaround I decided to avoid redirects (as they are causing trouble), which almost fixed this "freezing". It still occurs from time to time with high number of concurrent connections, but maybe hardware or OS resources limit is bottleneck this time.

I don't know either. Else maybe use httperf or ab? One of those isn't even able to go beyond HTTP/1.0 ;-p


IIRC that's in the FAQ too but then again your logs might show? HTTP/1.1 is more than just that header (keep-alives and such)...

Maybe you can get the author to update the documentation because as you found out it indeed is a bit lacking...

For future readers: It's in FAQ, but hidden within another question (http://www.joedog.org/siege-faq/#a07). Just set

in .siegerc

Well, I'm not against HTTP/1.1 per se. It's just that siege doesn't implement all of it's features and that sometimes cause troubles. I tried ab, but didn't really understand meaning of it's output, so it's useless to me. I might try httperf.
You're right, I finally find it this time. Unfortunately documentation/FAQ isn't very clear.

I will, I just wanted to first try if someone else encountered this behavior before writing author directly.

Marking this thread as solved. Thank for help.

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