JMeter with Socks Proxy?

Question

I want to load test a socks proxy I have setup on aws. I would like to generate traffic from outside of the vpc. For now testing from my local machine should be sufficient but eventually I would like to move testing to one or more ec2 instances. JMeter seems to be a widely used tool for load testing but if anyone has any other suggestions it would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Using Jmeter through a SOCKS proxy is surprisingly simple;

1. Start your SOCKS proxy e.g on Linux ssh -D8080 https://dmz.server

2. Start Jmeter with JVM arg to use your proxy for all connections

   java -DsocksProxyHost=localhost -DsocksProxyPort=8080 -jar ApacheJMeter.jar

Answer 2

It depends on your programming skills as JMeter is the only GUI-based tool.

For instance

• Tsung is known for built-in Benchmarking a proxy server support and possibility to generate more load on less powerful machines
• Gatling has very nice reports and very "pleasant" Scala-based DSL
• Grinder - this guy can record requests on TCP level (while others support HTTP only). You need to know Python to modify and create Grinder scripts.

For more details on aforementioned tools see Open Source Load Testing Tools: Which One Should You Use? article, hopefully it will help to choose the right option.