Siege aborted due to excessive socket failure

Question

I have encountered this problem whilst trying to run off the following cmd from siege on Mac OS X 10.8.3.

siege -d1 -c 20 -t2m -i -f -r10 urls.txt

The output from Siege is the following:

** SIEGE 2.74
** Preparing 20 concurrent users for battle.
The server is now under siege...
done.
siege aborted due to excessive socket failure; you
can change the failure threshold in $HOME/.siegerc

Transactions:                  0 hits
Availability:               0.00 %
Elapsed time:              27.04 secs
Data transferred:           0.00 MB
Response time:              0.00 secs
Transaction rate:           0.00 trans/sec
Throughput:             0.00 MB/sec
Concurrency:                0.00
Successful transactions:           0
Failed transactions:            1043
Longest transaction:            0.00
Shortest transaction:           0.00

FILE: /usr/local/var/siege.log
You can disable this annoying message by editing
the .siegerc file in your home directory; change
the directive 'show-logfile' to false.

Answer 1

The problem may be that you run out of ephemeral ports. To remedy that, either expand the number of ports to use, or reduce the duration that ports stay in TIME_WAIT, or both.

Expand the usable ports:

Check your current setting:

$ sudo sysctl net.inet.ip.portrange.hifirst

net.inet.ip.portrange.hifirst: 49152

Set it lower to expand your window:

$ sudo sysctl -w net.inet.ip.portrange.hifirst=32768

net.inet.ip.portrange.hifirst: 49152 -> 32768

(hilast should already be at the max, 65536)

Reduce the maximum segment lifetime

$ sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.msl=1000

net.inet.tcp.msl: 15000 -> 1000