The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - Simulting Reduced Network Bandwidth

Simulting Reduced Network Bandwidth

Hi All

We are developing an application that will run over a private WAN (32Mb/s, 30ms ping from end to end). We would like to test this application on our office network, under simulated conditions similar to this WAN.

Does anybody have an idea how we can do this - I have come up with one UNIX based solution (dummynet), but we are an MS shop with no real UNIX experience...!

Thanks

Matt
Monday, October 20, 2003

NetLimiter http://www.netlimiter.com/

Jaxxon
Monday, October 20, 2003

www.shunra.com claims to do this. I don't know too much about them.

Joel Spolsky
Monday, October 20, 2003

Somebody else recently wondered about this elsewhere:

http://whatdoiknow.org/archives/001274.shtml

Edward Dale
Monday, October 20, 2003

Hook up two ethernets, and use taffic shaping to rate limit the bandwidth from one to the other, static shaping is pretty easy to setup too.

fw
Monday, October 20, 2003

NetLimiter is the best.

Just tried it and then spent half an hour removing it. No way even to start the system.

Alex R
Monday, October 20, 2003

Google for "Dreamteam Network Simulator" it works perfect for simulating a slow connection between services on your own PC. So you can make a database program connect to an SQL Server at only 56K even though it is running locally.

ChrisO
Monday, October 20, 2003

one small "gotcha" to keep in mind doing reduced bandwidth testing, though from what the initial poster described, it doesn't really apply to their situation:

if the reason you're doing reduced bandwidth testing is to examine behavior over dialup connections (meaning regular analog 56kb modems), you're not going to get the same actual throughput on a throttled LAN or T-1 as you would over a modem due to modem compression. Check if the throttling tools you use include the ability to adjust for this. If you simply throttle your 100 MBit LAN down to 56kb, you'd potentially be underestimating the actual throughput.

anon
Wednesday, October 22, 2003