How to use siege properly to performance test a web server?

Question

I am trying to use siege for performance tests on a webpage. See also this documentation.

But when I try to make an example request like

siege -c=1  --reps=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=42

I get the following output:

HTTP/1.1 200     0.82 secs:   24729 bytes ==> GET  /search?q=42

Transactions:                  1 hits
Availability:             100.00 %
Elapsed time:               1.82 secs
Data transferred:           0.02 MB
Response time:              0.82 secs
Transaction rate:           0.55 trans/sec
Throughput:             0.01 MB/sec
Concurrency:                0.45
Successful transactions:           1
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            0.82
Shortest transaction:           0.82

I thought you get the complete bunch of requests that are being made when connecting to a web site? Because when I open the inspector and go to the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=42 I get about 20 requests coming from google.com, with a total of some hundred kilobytes. And with siege it is only one request with 24 kilobytes?

Am I doing something wrong? Do I understand the documentation incorrect?

Answer 1

You have specified exactly one URL, so exactly one URL was tested. Siege is not a browser, so it is not parsing and evaluating html. You can still specify multiple URLs, e.g. via URLs file - see Siege doc: https://www.joedog.org/siege-manual/