How to load test your web site or application with siege

Trebuchet
Time to storm the castle!

Your mileage may vary, but this worked well for me. I wanted to test one of our sites under load. Our sites generally get a lot of traffic, so when we move from staging to production we have to keep in mind that we’re about to go from 1 or 2 developers hitting the pages to thousands of people.

I’ve previously used Apache Benchmark (ab) to load test, but it’s fairly limited. It can only test one page. I did a bit of digging and found siege. It was perfect for what I wanted to do. I wanted to submit my site to a heavy load, over a long period of time, and see what happened. I also wanted semi-realistic traffic, and with a few well-typed commands, I was able to create a file that siege can read that contained *exactly* the traffic from our site.

I used this to read the last 1000 hits from our apache logs:

tail -1000 /var/log/apache2/access.log | awk '{print "http://mysite.com" $8}' > /tmp/siege-urls.txt

It’s pretty simple, but I’ll break it down. The following gives me the last 1000 lines from the log. Your log might be in a different location, or named something else. If you want fewer lines, or more lines, change the 1000 to something else.

tail -1000 /var/log/apache2/access.log

Then, pipe the output of the above to awk and print out the url. In our apache logs, the url was in the eighth position. I also appended the site’s domain to the output, since the apache log does not contain that information (at least not in the format I wanted).

| awk '{print "http://mysite.com" $8}'

Lastly, save it to a file for later use.

> /tmp/siege-urls.txt

Next, I used this file to place the site under load. In the example below, I used -i for “internet” mode, where siege randomly reads a line from the file and requests it from the server. I also used only 4 concurrent users or worker threads. If you ramp up the concurrency, you can really put a lot of strain on the server.

siege -i -c 4 -f /tmp/siege-urls.txt

When the siege is underway, you’ll get output that looks like this:

HTTP/1.1 200   0.53 secs:    6926 bytes ==> /some/url?some=params
HTTP/1.1 200   0.54 secs:    7132 bytes ==> /some/other/url?other=params
HTTP/1.1 500   0.13 secs:     521 bytes ==> /some/url?some=params
HTTP/1.1 200   0.64 secs:    7133 bytes ==> /some/other/url?other=params
HTTP/1.1 500   0.13 secs:     521 bytes ==> /some/other/url?other=params
HTTP/1.1 404   0.09 secs:     431 bytes ==> /some/url?some=params

I paid close attention to the 404s and the 500 errors. They indicated that I was getting requests that were erroring out for some reason. Sometimes, those errors are simply bots that grab a hold of old urls and continue to request them. Sometimes, they are cause for concern.

Hitting Control-C ends the siege and you then get output like below.

Lifting the server siege...      done.
Transactions:		         125 hits
Availability:		       88.03 %
Elapsed time:		       29.18 secs
Data transferred:	        1.18 MB
Response time:		        0.41 secs
Transaction rate:	        4.28 trans/sec
Throughput:		        0.04 MB/sec
Concurrency:		        1.77
Successful transactions:         101
Failed transactions:	          17
Longest transaction:	        3.13
Shortest transaction:	        0.08

I also found it useful to look at top and a few other tools on the server while the siege was underway. In our case, I was interested in passenger’s memory consumption, so I used passenger-memory-status and passenger-status.

Photo Credit: Martin AddisonDemonstrating the Trebuchet

WordPress as a framework

Found on builtwith.com

I use wordpress for this blog. I also use it at work. WordPress is a wonderful solution when you need a website or a blog and you need it *right now*. That is reflected in the fact that as of now (Oct 22, 2011), it runs 1/2 of the top 10,000 sites on the internet. That blew me away the first time I heard it.

In the last year or so, especially with the addition of custom post types, it has become quite flexible as well. It is fairly easy to pull together a quick plugin to add a new type of content to wordpress. At work, we’ve used custom post types to create things like candidate profiles and video galleries. However, wordpress starts to falter a bit when what you are trying to add doesn’t bear at least a small resemblance to a post.

I’ve heard it said that WordPress is a CMS that is trying to be a framework, so I’m always interested when I hear of projects that attempt to make it even more framework-like. MTV is one of those projects. Some developers at the News Apps Blog Chicago Tribune have recently released a plugin that makes WordPress act more like a true framework.

My main question at this point is the same one they themselves ask in their documentation. “Why?” I can understand it if you are limited to PHP hosting. I can also see it as a way to introduce framework-based programming to developers who are not familiar with frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django. MVC frameworks can be intimidating, and this could be a way to introduce those concepts in a more familiar environment.

At any rate, it’s intriguing and is worth a longer look, which I will try to do in the coming weeks.