How to install Siege for Mac OS X 10.8

Siege is a wonderful tool for benchmarking http urls.  Unfortunately since Mountain Lion it can be a bit fidly to install, the main download website has a dmg file that once downloaded says that ones version of OSX is not supported; so build from source.  And building from source has problems with X not being supplied by default.

Brew FTW.

So I resorted to bundled packagers, firstly fink but then Brew.  Brew worked first time with little effort.

http://mxcl.github.io/homebrew/


    ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"
    brew doctor

    brew install siege
    siege.config

Then edit the .siegerc file generated by siege.config, setting connection from 'close' to 'keep-alive'.  I also disable logging too.


Benchmarks can then be run as follows:

    siege -c 100 -b http://www.google.com > /dev/null

Press ctrl-c when you want to stop the test and see the stats.

Vagrant Script for compiling JDK 8 from source

I recently wanted to take a look at Java 8, without wanting to pollute my working environment. The JDK has a fair few dependencies that must be installed before it can be compiled. So I created the following Vagrantfile which I have chosen to share here.

Vagrant is a great wrapper for running virtual machines locally. After installing vagrant, to just type 'vagrant up' in the same directory as the following file and it will handle creating a 64bit Ubuntu VM locally, installing dependencies, checking out the head branch of JDK8 and compiling it.

After Vagrant has finished creating the VM, and compiling the JDK.  You can log in to the Ubuntu instance by typing 'vagrant ssh' and from there you will be able to use the compiled JDK, make changes, recompile and so forth.

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

$checkoutAndCompileJDK = <<SCRIPT
  sudo vagrant
  cd ~

  sudo apt-get update

  sudo apt-get install -y mercurial
  sudo apt-get install -y make
  sudo apt-get install -y unzip
  sudo apt-get install -y zip
  sudo apt-get install -y openjdk-7-jdk
  sudo apt-get install -y build-essential
  sudo apt-get install -y libX11-dev libxext-dev libxrender-dev libxtst-dev
  sudo apt-get install -y libcups2-dev
  sudo apt-get install -y libfreetype6-dev
  sudo apt-get install -y libasound2-dev
  sudo apt-get install -y ccache

  sudo apt-get install -y alsa
  sudo apt-get install -y cups
  sudo apt-get install -y xrender

  sudo apt-get install -y libpng12-dev
  sudo apt-get install -y libgif-dev
  sudo apt-get install -y libfreetype6
  sudo apt-get install -y pkg-config


  hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/jdk8 jdk8

  cd jdk8

  bash ./get_source.sh

  bash ./configure
  make all
SCRIPT




Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "precise64"

  config.vm.box_url = "http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box"

  config.vm.provision :shell, :inline => $checkoutAndCompileJDK

  config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
    vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", "4096"]
  end

end