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Comment by riobard | Hacker News Reader

That's really convoluted to simulate bad network. Here is an easy route if you are on OS X: get Apple's Network Link Conditioner [1], a System Preferences panel plugin. Once installed, tune your network to 3G Lossy and test again.

[1]: http://adcdownload.apple.com/Developer_Tools/hardware_io_too...

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That link doesn't work, but these instructions do:[1]

    Xcode > Open Developer Tool > More Developer Tools...

and get "Hardware IO Tools for Xcode".

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9659382/installing-apples...

That won't impress hipsters.

The test is about download performance and cacheability, though Apple's Network Link Conditioner is useful.

Define “performance“ and “cacheability”.

Front-end Performance: both actual and user-perceived. Cacheability: How well dynamic and static assets cache, and are retrieved from cache. This also has an effect on performance.

None of the above has anything unique to do with testing on a floppy drive. You need a good way to simulate different network conditions, and a good inspector to check the various states on the client.

And it even shows up under the Developer pane in Settings on your iPhone! It's incredibly helpful.

Ha, I didn't know that! Where is the Developer panel on iPhone?

When you provision your device for development it comes up.

What OS are you on, if floppies are convoluted?

It's 2013 and we are using a floppy drive to simulate high network latency. If that's not convoluted, I'm not sure what else could be.

What makes it more complicated than loading the files from anywhere else?

Like finding a USB floppy drive and a floppy disk in 2013?

A search for "floppy disk" on newegg.com returned 52 results. There was some noise to deal with, but the most expensive drive I could find was $30. The whole process took less than five minutes. Nothing complicated whatsoever.

We definitely have very different ideas of “complicated”.

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