siege: Hammer away at your server of choice

I like siege, even though it definitely falls into the bracket of “esoteric tools I will probably never have a use for.”

siege attempts to burden a target server with a lot of traffic, ostensibly so the site designers and server administrators can see how well it stands up to the load.

I certainly have no problem with that, and as you can see above, apparently neither does Google. For the three seconds I pretended to be 10 people. 😐

siege is very easy to figure out; the man page takes all of about four minutes to read, and the options are very intuitive. You can follow my example above if you like, keeping in mind that without the -t flag, siege will run ad infinitum.

And it has color! 😀

siege is in Arch and Debian. I count siege as a useful and intuitive tool that’s worth exploring … but unfortunately, I’ll probably never need it personally. All the same, a big green smilie for siege: