bandwidth regulation for testing

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bandwidth regulation for testing

how do i simulate a dialup to test my site?

ebenschaefer

8:22 pm on Feb 20, 2003 (gmt 0)

I have a cable modem through a router on a 4 node home network. Is there a simple way to drop the bandwidth to dialup speeds to simulate a dialup connection for testing my web site?

I want to determine overall load speeds, but also what loads first. One site has a large jpeg for a splash page, and I have some text links, etc. that disappear once the jpeg loads. I need to make sure that everything loads in the correct order.

Thanks in advance.

ps - I don't currently have a dialup account, so I can't just disconnect the cable and dialup.

MWpro

11:10 pm on Feb 20, 2003 (gmt 0)

Welcome to Webmaster World!

This is a very interesting question and I would like to know the answer as well. Sometimes when I am concerned about loading time for 56kers I log on a free isp (i use juno), however this is very frustrating as these free isp's are not reliable.

ebenschaefer

8:50 pm on Feb 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

I thought I remembered hearing about software that you could adjust throughput with, but I can't seem to find any mention of it anywhere.

g1smd

10:03 pm on Feb 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

I have seen a website where you type in the URL of the page of interest and it produces a report listing all of the objects that need to be loaded (HTML, styles, scripts, images, etc) and their sizes, along with an estimated loading time at several common download speeds. Can't find the URL right at this moment.

4serendipity

10:21 pm on Feb 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

I have seen a website where you type in the URL of the page of interest and it produces a report listing all of the objects that need to be loaded (HTML, styles, scripts, images, etc) and their sizes, along with an estimated loading time at several common download speeds. Can't find the URL right at this moment.

You could have been thinking about Netmechanic. It's an ok service, but it doesn't simulate how your page will look when it loads at a slow speed.

jamesa

11:30 pm on Feb 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

I just found a cross-platform app called Charles [xk72.com]. It's Java so it's run on Winows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Acts like a proxy.

I just tried it on OS X, it works, but seems too slow. The default settings for throttling are...

Bandwidth (Bytes/sec): 5120
Latency (ms): 200

What settings would best simulate a decent 56K? Is the latency to high? I think my old 56K was averaging closer to 5734 bytes/sec if I remember correctly.

ebenschaefer

3:14 pm on Feb 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

Great! Thanks for the replies.

ebenschaefer

2:56 am on Feb 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

I tried the xat.com product, but it did not display the pages correctly. seemed to have trouble with SSIs.

brotherhood of LAN

3:00 am on Feb 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

can you not get away with simple math here? my 56k downloads an average 4k a second, and seemingly most other people with modems I know also get around the same speed.

So if all is well with averaging connection speeds for a particular bandwidth, you could just divide by 2,4,10/whatever to represent theh load time for a modem?....

ebenschaefer

3:29 am on Feb 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

Even after clearing my cache, my pages are loading in under a second. Kind of hard to accurately time.

I feel pretty confident that the site is quick, but I want to see it at 56k. I might change some image sizes or change the order in which something loads. Or change the table layout to ensure that the title of the site loads quickly before the browser starts rendering another table.

but mainly, it seems like it should be an easy thing to do, choking bandwidth. I am going to look at the Charles product. Then I will dig around and see if I have any proxy software anywhere, and see if that supports bandwidth reduction.

ebenschaefer

3:46 am on Feb 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

Well, Charles is kicking a lot of errors. From my site and sites like espn and yahoo. And as mentioned, it is slow. Dramatically increased load times even without throttling enabled, but that could be strictly because of the errors.

But I don't mean to badmouth either product. I admittedly took a very short look at both of them.

amoore

4:54 am on Feb 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

You could probably use something like wondershaper ( [lartc.org...] ) to throttle down your connection to 56K if you wanted. Of course, that's assuming that you're running linux.

ebenschaefer

2:54 pm on Feb 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

Actually, I am running XP.

hakre

2:59 pm on Feb 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

hi ebenschaefer, didn't the just mentioned charles project did the job? looks like it will run under xp as well.

ebenschaefer

3:08 pm on Feb 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

I thought it would. It is a proxy that allows you to throttle bandwidth. And it tracks all requests/responses, and keeps an error log.

But it was causing a lot of errors to be returned. Like Java socket errors? basically, the error messages were a little over my head and I didn't look at them too closely. But these were errors from sites like Yahoo.

Yahoo would load all its text no problem, then take forever to load images. And this is with full bandwidth. Same with espn, msn, etc. and my own site. So I didn't trust the results. Once I throttled the bandwidth down, Yahoo never did load its images. And i am just talking about the gifs at top for nav.

But it did work to some degree.