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

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