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.