Installing Siege Stress Tester on CentOS 6

Siege, similar to Apache Benchmark, is an amazing stress testing tool for your web-server. You can spin up a number of connections to simulate concurrency of transactions and gain invaluable insight into how your app or website might perform while under, well, stress!

How to Install Siege on CentOS 6

To get started, simply download Siege from the official website and unpack it using Tar:

cd /opt
wget http://www.joedog.org/pub/siege/siege-2.72.tar.gz
tar -zxvf siege-2.72.tar.gz

Next, navigate to the Siege folder and compile it:

cd /opt/siege-2.72
./configure
make && make install

You’re done, let’s confirm that Siege is working by checking its version:

siege -v

Siege Examples

Try running a few of the Siege Examples below (at your own discretion) to verify that your setup is working:

siege -c25 -t1M  www.example.com
siege -c25 -t50s  example.com

Common Errors

[alert] unsupported protocol

If you receive this error message, it means that you’re trying to Siege a website using https (SSL) without SSL installed – or – Siege cannot determine the location of your OpenSSL installation.

To fix this error, simply compile OpenSSL statically with Siege to get SSL support:

cd /opt
wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.0.1e.tar.gz
tar -zxvf openssl-1.0.1e.tar.gz
cd siege-2.72.tar.gz
./configure -with-ssl=/opt/openssl-233