REST load testing with siege

Siege is a pretty nifty linux utility for HTTP/HTTPS load testing it can be downloaded here : siege homepage
Siege allows you to write a list of URLs in a file (one URL per line) the utility will then parse the file and execute the load tests according to your configuration file .siegerc or the command's arguments.

The only thing I do not like about siege is the fact that I would like to have stats per URL; when siege parses the url file it will write a log file with global statics for the siege session

Something like so :

2012-09-21 12:03:52,   1813,     121.43,          19,       0.49,       14.93,        0.16,        7.38,    1813,       0

which to my taste is not very clear

While executing the tests siege prints out statistics that are not found in the siege log file (which in my case are more useful) but if you have multiple URLs you don't know for which URL the printed stats are.

So I decided to handle the situation differently using awk and a bash script

Note that I'm no Linux expert so the script could probably be better written but here is how I broke it down :

I have 3 files

1. The urls.txt file (a txt file containing the URLs I want to test :

#URL1
http://myURL1/param1/param2.json
http://myURL1/param3/param2.json
#URL2
http://myURL2/param3/param2.json
http://myURL2/param3/param1.json

2. The AWK script file

!/#/{

   print "\n"
   print "**********************************************************"
   print "Testing URL : "$1
   print "**********************************************************"
   system ("echo Testing URL : "$1 " >> " SIEGE_OUTPUT " 2>&1")
   system ("siege " $1 "-v -b -r"REPS" -c"CONC" --mark="$1 " --log="SIEGE_LOG_FILE ">> "SIEGE_OUTPUT " 2>&1 ")
   print "\n"

}

3. The bash script containing all the configuration and calling the awk script

#! /bin/sh
#LOG_FILE=./siege-log
URL_FILE=./urls.txt # file containing the URLs to handle
USER=$(whoami)
NOW=$(date +"%d-%m-%Y_%H-%M-%S")
PWD=$(pwd)
SIEGE_LOG_FILE=$PWD"/log_"$NOW".log"  #siege log's file
SIEGE_OUTPUT=$PWD"/output_"$NOW".log" #where siege's output will be redirected
CONC=50 #number of concurrent users
REPS=1  # number of repetitions
echo "loading URLS from the file : "$URL_FILE
echo "Writing siege log into the file :" $SIEGE_LOG_FILE

SET -- $CONC

awk -f siege-benchmark.awk -v CONC=$CONC REPS=$REPS SIEGE_LOG_FILE=$SIEGE_LOG_FILE SIEGE_OUTPUT=$SIEGE_OUTPUT $URL_FILE

Now according to how your siegerc file is configured output can be a bit different I have the verbose mod off and benchmark mode on. Below is an excerpt from my log file

******************************************
Testing URL : http://myURL1/param1/param2.json
******************************************
** SIEGE 2.72
** Preparing 50 concurrent users for battle.
The server is now under siege...


Transactions:                     50 hits
Availability:                 100.00 %
Elapsed time:                   0.08 secs
Data transferred:               0.00 MB
Response time:                  0.04 secs
Transaction rate:             625.00 trans/sec
Throughput:                     0.03 MB/sec
Concurrency:                   24.62
Successful transactions:          50
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            0.07
Shortest transaction:           0.01