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]