Bug 62734

We have been using Jmeter every year for the last 7 years to help us prepare our key systems before the holidays.  This year one of our standard tests we failing out of the box and after a full day of troubleshooting it and trying different things yesterday, here is what I am able to report.

Bug:
Even with a single process running multiple iterations hitting our API we see anywhere from 1 to 10% of requests taking a long time to respond and resulting in a java SSLHandShakeErrors (I'll paste the stack below my explanation).  As the number of requests is 100 and over, that number ends up being more like 10% of the requests that will eventually fail this way.

Versions tried:
I have tested this with latest versions of Jmeter 4, then Jmeter 3 and again with the Jmeter 2 version we used in prior years.  Additionally I swapped out and tried latest sun oracle versions of java 8, java 9 and java 10 (As of Sept 17th 2018).  I even modified my jmeter configs trying different things such as changing the http client from HttpClient4 to Java to no avail.  Additionally after reading all relevant user group and bug report discussions related to similar things in the past, we found nothing was able to eliminate this issue.  For example, setting JVM_ARGS="-Djsse.enableSNIExtension=false" seemed to make it perform slightly better, but on average there were a similar number of SSLHandShakeErrors with or without that setting.  Additionally found from reading and diffing them that for a while in newer versions of java the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files have been included and so that is not related to the issue.

Hypothesis:
Jmeter HTTPS tests with tlsv1.2 and 256 bit AES ciphers only lead to 5-10% SSLHandShakeErrors.  Our similar SSL cert with 128 bit AES ciphers does not fail in this manner.  Using another tool such as locust.io which uses python requests to do something similar does not run into such SSLHandShakeErrors.

Stacktrace:
javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: Remote host closed connection during handshake
	at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.readRecord(SSLSocketImpl.java:1002)
	at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.performInitialHandshake(SSLSocketImpl.java:1385)
	at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.startHandshake(SSLSocketImpl.java:1413)
	at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.startHandshake(SSLSocketImpl.java:1397)
	at sun.net.www.protocol.https.HttpsClient.afterConnect(HttpsClient.java:559)
	at sun.net.www.protocol.https.AbstractDelegateHttpsURLConnection.connect(AbstractDelegateHttpsURLConnection.java:185)
	at sun.net.www.protocol.https.HttpsURLConnectionImpl.connect(HttpsURLConnectionImpl.java:162)
	at org.apache.jmeter.protocol.http.sampler.HTTPJavaImpl.sample(HTTPJavaImpl.java:539)
	at org.apache.jmeter.protocol.http.sampler.HTTPSamplerProxy.sample(HTTPSamplerProxy.java:74)
	at org.apache.jmeter.protocol.http.sampler.HTTPSamplerBase.sample(HTTPSamplerBase.java:1189)
	at org.apache.jmeter.protocol.http.sampler.HTTPSamplerBase.sample(HTTPSamplerBase.java:1178)
	at org.apache.jmeter.threads.JMeterThread.executeSamplePackage(JMeterThread.java:490)
	at org.apache.jmeter.threads.JMeterThread.processSampler(JMeterThread.java:416)
	at org.apache.jmeter.threads.JMeterThread.run(JMeterThread.java:250)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748)
Caused by: java.io.EOFException: SSL peer shut down incorrectly
	at sun.security.ssl.InputRecord.read(InputRecord.java:505)
	at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.readRecord(SSLSocketImpl.java:983)
	... 14 more