Recently I needed to do some performance testing of an SSL instance on a VM. I considered using JMeter, but decided to use OpenSSL to get a rudimentary picture instead.

To obtain a basic result, we connect to the server and pull the /index.php file. You can specify whatever file you’d like to download, or none at all if you simply want to test connections.1

openssl s_time -www /index.php -new -connect www.trustwave.com:443

Your result will look something like this:

No CIPHER specified
Collecting connection statistics for 30 seconds
ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt
159 connections in 5.82s; 27.32 connections/user sec, bytes read 62328
159 connections in 31 real seconds, 392 bytes More >