Simulate Slow Internet Connection while Testing your Apps

So you have your Next-gen cool Web 2.0 application ready! You have tested it on your LAN environment and on your high speed internet connection – all seems ok and you are ready to deploy it in the ‘real world’. A few hours later, you get feedback that your application does not perform well on slower connections. That hurts!

Well the truth is that real world internet connections are much slower than you think. Your application end users may not always be broadband users but also people accessing your app through a dial-up connection, mobile sets, 3G or USB dongles. Most designers and developers forget to test their application on slower internet connections, resulting in a poor performing application.

Now there are many tools that let you simulate slow network connections. Out of them, what caught my attention is a nice Firefox browser plug-in that ‘effortlessly’ lets you simulate different speeds of Internet connection and lets you view the effects of slow speeds on your application. The plug-in is called Firefox Throttle.

Firefox Throttle is an extension that allows you to control download/upload rates and monitor current bandwidth utilization. Amongst other features, what I liked the most was that it lets you throttle localhost connections as well. Cool! Here’s a screenshot of the plugin in action.

The plug-in shows the current bandwidth utilization indicators in its Status panel as shown below and lets you quickly turn on/off throttling.

You may also want to check out Sloppy