in my company we have many proxy servers used as firewalls that are
always heavily used. I would like to write a program that could tell
me which one was under the least amount of strain so I could switch to
it.

Thing is, I have no idea really how this could be done. I don't think
simple pinging works. I thought about requesting a web page through
each proxy server and finding out which one came back quickest but I'm
pretty sure that the Proxy will cache pages, which will defeat the
object of the test. Someone mentioned TELNETing onto the proxy but
didn't know how/what to do once you were there!

Any idea's?

Dave