Siege is an open source application that simulates a massive burst in traffic by sending a configurable number of concurrent connections to our application. It's a perfect way to get introduced to executing a basic load test. There are many load-testing services available, but it's useful to be able to execute one on our own with just a laptop. It's also a nice bonus as it's completely free.
In this recipe, we will learn how to install Siege and then run a load test against our application. Siege has an abundance of different configuration options; we'll learn how to use them. In this recipe, we will be pushing our app to a limit and can have some fun with load testing. We shouldn't run this against a production application; it's fairly easy to overload an application with Siege. We wouldn't want to interrupt any real users because of a test.