Siege: Load Testing and an Unexpected Logging Issue

Siege is a powerful command-line utility for load testing web servers. It allows you to simulate a large number of concurrent users to assess the performance and stability of your website or application.

Recently, while using Siege, an interesting issue arose with writing results to a log file. The command with the -l option (for example, -l siege.log) unexpectedly resulted in a "Connection refused" error, even though the tests themselves were running successfully without logging enabled.

The solution turned out to be quite simple: instead of the short -l option, the full form of the option --log= (for example, --log=siege.log) needed to be used. After this change, logging started working correctly, and the test results were successfully written to the specified file.

This case serves as a reminder that the behavior of command-line utilities can vary slightly depending on the version or operating system. It's always helpful to consult the official documentation or test different option variations if you encounter unexpected problems.