Bandwidth Simulator

[evildan]

I have recently started a job where I need to provide some statistical data to my boss. Mainly download times of key HTML pages on our website.

I realize there are websites out there, which will breakdown the total time of download on various simulated connection speeds, but I'm looking for a way to slow my browser down to demostrate what dial-up users will experience firsthand.

I've found that saying 30 second load time to people who use a T1 all day really doesn't hit home. They frequently say "that's fine" or "that's not too long for our customers to wait."

We have recently discovered that less then 13% of internet consumers are using broadband. And although next year that number is expected to double, that's still less then 1/3 of those consumers who buy online. Giving a manager a number no longer seems to effectively illustrate the need to optimize our pages. So actually showing them a slow loading page would be more effective, in my opinion.

I, of course, would need to toggle this 'slow down' on and off and possibly include other bandwidth options (56K, 4Mps Cable, DSL, T1, T3, etc...) so we can conduct our own tests.

Anyone know of such a tool I could purchase or download?

[shrill]

You probably want one browser running at 56k and another running at 512k and have them load a page at the same kind so you can compare, yeah? I don't know of anything that would do that system-wide. There are download managers that have incoming bandwidth limits on them. It would be cool if a web browser would allow user adjustable bandwidth controls on individual windows though!

Well, it might be too simplistic, but why don't you just dial up to a regular internet provider at 56k use that computer to show it off? (Or VPN into your intranet via modem or something).

If your development webserver is running apache as it should be, you might try: http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_throttle/index.shtml

There are probably some unix tricks that you can do to limit a user's network bandwidth as well, but I don't know what they are.


And thanks - managers need a lot of help in the reality department - your efforts are appreciated

- shrill -