It would be useful to perform abortive connection release (i.e. sending a TCP
RST instead of FIN) in JMeter. This is useful to prevent large numbers of
sockets sitting around with a TIME_WAIT status. OpenSTA has a feature that
allows this (in TestExecutor_web.ini under the [Sockets] section, the Linger
property can be set to 0).

Java (well, the Sun JVM anyway, I'm not sure about others) allows us to perform
an abortive connection release by setting socket lingering to on, and the socket
linger time to 0 (using the Socket.setSoLinger method -- see
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/net/articles/connection_release.html).

The Jakarta Commons HTTP Client allows the socket linger time to be set to 0
(using the http.socket.linger property) so this should be a relatively easy fix.
However there appears to be a bug that prevents socket lingering from being
turned-on when the linger time is set to 0 (I've raised this, see:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HTTPCLIENT-599).