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Joe Dog Software

Proudly serving the Internets since 1999

Siege 4.0.4

Your JoeDog is pleased to announce the release of siege-4.0.4. Exciting!

This release includes numerous bug fixes. If you have cooties, then it has the cure. In addition to fixes, it offers three new command line options:

-p URL, –print=URL
This option is similar to -g / –get but it PRINTS the page it received from the server.

–no-parser
Turn off the HTML parser. When siege downloads a page, it parses it for additional page elements such as style-sheets, javascript and images. It will make additional requests for any elements it finds. With this option enabled, siege will stop after it pulls down the main page.

–no-follow
This directive instructs siege not to follow 3xx redirects.

This release also includes support for PATCH and PUT.



Siege: Zip encoding disabled

Your JoeDog was just alerted to this behavior in siege:

[alert] Zip encoding disabled; siege requires zlib support to enable it
Segmentation fault: 11

Certainly the segmentation fault is the result of a bug, but we also have a configuration error. Siege is accepting a content encoding that it doesn’t support.

HTTP protocol allows servers to encode content before they send it. If a page is really large, the server might compress it first. But here’s the thing: If the server uses an encoding the client doesn’t support, then it’s pointless to encode it, right? HTTP provides a mechanism by which you can tell the server the encodings you support.

That brings us to the Accept-encoding request header. In this case, siege is sending something like ‘Accept-encoding: gzip’ although it wasn’t compiled with a compression library. To fix this problem, you can do one of two things: 1.) recompile siege with zlib and zlib-devel installed on your system. 2.) Send an empty Accept-encoding header.

You can configure that in your $HOME/.siege/siege.conf file like this:

accept-encoding =

But honestly, you should probably recompile siege with zlib and zlib-devel installed on your system…

UPDATE: Your JoeDog is unable to reproduce this segmentation fault. The sieger who reported this issue hasn’t responded with the version he is using. If you’re experiencing this, we recommend updating to version 4.0.3rc5 or higher.



Please Test

Remember when Jeb Bush was giving a sad and lonely speech on the campaign trail? He made some stupid point and the audience sat stone-faced as he stood there awkwardly. After what seemed like an eternity, the young Bush hopeful implored his audience to “Please clap.” That’s Your JoeDog right now. But instead of applause, we need you to test the latest siege release candidate. Siege-4.0.3-rc2

We know what you’re thinking: What’s in it for me?  Exciting new features, that’s what! Really? Like what?

Continue reading Please Test



Quick Note

Somebody sent Your JoeDog a patch that he promptly lost. If that person could resend it, he’d very much appreciate it…..

UPDATE: Your JoeDog found the patch. It’s a fine piece of work by Valery Levental.  The patch tested out and was submitted to version control. In all likelihood, we won’t release a beta distribution. You can grab the code off github.com.

This patch

  1. Fixes our improper handling of the Data URI scheme
  2. Fixes our improper handling of HTTP 1/1 responses containing Content-Length: 0
  3. Improves our handling of chunked transfers
  4. Further optimizes the http header parser.

Some siege users have reported hangs with version 4.x.x This update may fix those conditions (although in some cases, the problem was tied to a specific version of glibc.)



Siege Release: 4.0.1

Your JoeDog is pleased to announce the release of siege-4.0.1.

This release contains no recognizable goodies for you to play with but it will probably reduce the number of times you curse at us. It is primarily a bug fix.

You knew that was coming, right? Some of you may have put off the move to 4.x in anticipation of the blessed 0.0.1 bug fix release. Well, here it is!

This release includes a patch by Niklas Hambüchen which improves the efficiency of chunked encoding reads. It also includes a patch by Warren Young which improves / fixes issues with cookie handling and expiration. Trent Oswald included additional default MIME types and V.  Filanovsky added support for URLs longer than 4096 characters.

The release also includes several other minor bug fixes and documentation errors.

If you’re running version 4.0.0, then you should probably upgrade.

[SIEGE RELEASE: 4.0.0]



Siege Release: 4.0.0

Good news, JoeDoggers. Siege 4.0.0 is finally out of beta.

While this release contains exciting new features, it’s built upon a major architectural overhaul. For most of you, these changes will go unnoticed but they will certainly make things better for Your JoeDog.

Did you ever look at code you wrote fifteen years ago and wretch? Large portions of this program invoked that reaction. Siege was originally written in 1999 and as such it contained large portions of code that were styled like we coded back in 1999, i.e., suckishly.

Your JoeDog still prefers C to C++ but that doesn’t mean he’s averse to object oriented design. In fact, he loves himself some objects. Just because you code in C doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the benefits of OO design. Afterall, what is an object other than a thing that references itself? With Siege-4.0.0 nearly all code modules were reworked as objects. This makes debugging so much simpler which gives Your JoeDog a happy.

Who cares? What about the features?

  1. HTML Parser — The most significant new feature is page parsing. When siege makes a request, it will download the page and parse it for elements like style sheets, javascripts, images, etc. It will then make ensuing requests for all those items.
  2. Cookie Persistence — It persists cookies according to directives set by the server. They are stored in $HOME/.siege/cookies.txt on a thread by thread basis.
  3. Color Output — Or more importantly, non-color output. Siege 4.0.0 allows you to turn off color output using ‘color = off’ in your siege.conf file.
  4. Cache Support — Siege has always had some cache support, but this version is more compliant with RFC 2616. See the documentation for more information.

[SIEGE: Release 4.0.0]



Code Release: Siege 4.0.0 beta 6

Siege 4.0.0 is inching closer to final.  This release adds a coat of wax and refines the documentation. The code is largely complete with no new functionality planned this version. Your JoeDog is still trying to decide which new features to enable by default.  Currently, the HTML parser is set to ‘off’ but we’re leaning toward enabling it. New major release; new major feature.

The big push to 4.0.0 began in October when we started tweaking 3.x in a manner consistent with the 4.0 vision. Since then, countless hours have gone into this architectural overhaul. It’s nice to finally see the finish line. Once this effort finally winds down we can go back to using this blog for its intended purpose: Smearing more snark on the Internets.

Help Your JoeDog and America

Your JoeDog doesn’t ask for much. We give this code away and answer your questions for free! We answer your questions even when the answers are in the FAQ. In fact, sometimes we paste the FAQ into our email response. Do we ever tell you to RTFM? No! Should we? Probably.

Unfortunately, we have a long history of people refusing to use our beta releases. The Siege 4.0.0 betas have been downloaded around 50 times over a period that saw thousands of 3.x downloads.

So we’re begging you. Please download Siege 4.0.0 beta 6 and put it to the test. Make sure to enable the HTML parser in the $HOME/.siege/siege.conf file. When you’re done, send an email or leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Download

All of our software can be downloaded from http://download.joedog.org/ Below you’ll find a direct link to Siege 4.0.0 beta six. Happy hacking.

[SIEGE 4.0.0 beta 6]



Siege 3.1.4

Your JoeDog just released siege-3.1.4. Exciting! Oh, don’t get carried away, it’s just bug fixes. {sad trombone} We patched portions of the code from 4.x.x which is still in beta.

The 3.x.x line will be maintained with patches and fixes at least through 2016 but we don’t plan to add any new features. That effort is concentrated solely in the 4.x.x branch.

[SIEGE: 3.1.4]

 



Siege 4.0.0 beta 4

Siege 4.0 is now in beta four. It will probably be months until the final version is released. This release isn’t riddled with bugs as much as it’s simply lacks refinement. Let me explain.

What distinguishes Siege 4.0 from earlier versions is this. It downloads the HTML and parses it for additional page elements. It looks for images, stylesheets, javascript, etc., and adds them to a queue for download. In this sense, it behaves a lot like a browser. Suddenly we’re forced to care about things we never cared about. Consider Content-encoding.

Earlier versions provided a directive called ‘accept-encoding’ in the siegerc. We let you put anything you pleased in there.  If you wanted the server to send brotli, bzip2, compress, whatever, we didn’t care. Siege didn’t do anything with its download. It counted the bytes and discarded the content. Now all of a sudden it cares about content.

We encourage you to play with these beta releases and provide us feedback. In the meantime, we’ll continue to refine the program. Given the example above, we’ll detect your compression libraries at compile time and build a Accept-encoding header based on what your computer can accept. Can you support bzip2, gzip and deflate?

Accept-encoding: gzip; deflate; bzip2

Until then, you’re on your own.

[SIEGE RELEASE:  4.0 beta 4]



A Siege Major Release

You guys asked for it and Your JoeDog delivered! The problem is you guys asked for it fifteen years ago and Your JoeDog delivered yesterday.

Beginning with version 4.0.0 beta 1, siege will parse the requested HTML document for additional elements such as style sheets, javascripts, images, etc. and make additional requests for those elements. This feature is still considered experimental so it’s off by default. To enable the parser you need to add this directive to your $HOME/.siege/siege.conf file:

parser = true

Siege was originally designed with performance in mind. Every thread basically dumped its HTML into the same bucket. This made parsing the content impossible without a design change. The choices were to wrap the reads with thread locks or create individual buckets for every thread. The former option would dramatically decrease performance and the latter option will require a lot of RAM. Imagine, if you will, running 255 browser tabs at once. “Meh,” Your JoeDog thought, “RAM is cheap now.”

We want to get the new version into your hands as soon as possible so it’s available with a few caveats:

  1. Don’t use gzip’d encoding – it will handle it but it’s not ready for prime time.
  2. Don’t expect cache validation to work – it requires a design overhaul
  3. Don’t expect it to parse poorly formatted HTML
  4. Element requests are sequential. We plan to make them concurrent.

There’s still a lot of work until 4.0.0 is ready for Prime Time but it can serve you well as long as your keep its limitations in mind.

[SIEGE RELEASE: 4.0.0-beta2]