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Comment by joshuacc | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know a good way to replicate this in Windows? Would be great to have a more user-like experience when working on my Rails app.

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Charles (http://www.charlesproxy.com) is cross platform and does latency, among a dozen other really useful things.

Unfortunately, I'm unaware of how to do this natively but I recommend using Dummynet which has a Windows port of the FreeBSD networking tool. Oddly, their website appears to be down so here is the Google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YJ8bhlD...

You need to install the drivers but once done you effectively use the same commands with ipfw as on FreeBSD (as described in another thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2005190). I just used it for the first time the other day to test a web app browsing with a 400ms delay on a WinXP machine. It worked like a charm.

Host the app on a local Linux VM perhaps?

This is what I do and it works perfectly. I use VirtualBox and can stop any of the servers at any time and reduce my memory/CPU footprint for other activities. VirtualBox also lets me configure the network easily.

If you only want it for http you could use Fiddler (http://www.fiddler2.com)

If you have a spare machine, you can use WanEm http://wanem.sourceforge.net/ livecd. WanEm gives you a nice web interface to configure network parameters. I have used it successfully to check effects of latency on Lotus Notes on Windows.

I've used TMNetSim here, which also lets you simulate variable latency and packet loss:

http://tmurgent.com/Tools.aspx

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