Your JoeDog plans to put the brakes on you people.

The number one we email message we receive goes something like this: “When we hit the server with 60 billion users we get socket timeouts. How do we correct that?” Short answer: configure your web server with a pool of 60 billion threads.

If you run more siege users than you have web handlers, requests start to queue up and sockets start to timeout. Out of the box, apache has a pool of 256 handlers. So if you run siege with 1024 users, 768 of them are waiting for a thread to handle their request.

So this is where the brakes come in. Your JoeDog plans to add a 255 thread limit in the siegerc file. If you configure more users than that, it will warn you and reduce the pool to 255. You can override the limit inside the file but in the comments you’ll find this lecture splaining why you shouldn’t do that without configuring your site for high capacity.

[drops mic]