Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

If you work on anything web related and you have a Mac or an iOS device, I strongly encourage you to try the "Network Link Conditioner". It's a preference pane (on OS X) or a setting (on iOS) that allows you to simulate different types of networks. You can artificially limit bandwidth and transmission delay, simulate package loss and DNS delay.

For me, it's become an essential tool for testing website & app performance.

View on HN

There's also Comcast[0]. No clue if it's any good but the name is amazing.

[0] https://github.com/tylertreat/Comcast

Seems like a copy of the joke the people of The Onion came up with a few months earlier, ComcastifyJS: https://theonion.github.io/comcastifyjs/

Chrome has a network throttling emulation in the dev tools too: https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/device-mode

One thing I wish I was able to do in the Chrome tools is to set my bandwith and latency preferences manually...

Yes! There is a huge jump between DSL and Wi-Fi. Adding the ability to randomly drop out the network would be nice too.

Somebody opened an issue on the Chromium bug tracker asking for the ability to customize those parameters. The Chromium devs added another preset and marked it as "fixed" even though it clearly isn't.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=441858

It doesn't affect things like Web Sockets though.

If you're on a Linux system, the 'tc' (traffic control) command has many similar abilities, though the UI is CLI only and is a bit cryptic. There are many posts and articles on usage though, including the Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control manual.

Nice! Does anyone know whether something like this exists on Windows?

Google Chrome Canary has network throttling functionality.

As does plain Google Chrome, at least on OSX. Open Dev Tools and click the 2nd icon on top, next to the loupe, which looks like a mobile phone. From there you can specify a set of throttling speeds (offline, gprs, edge, 3G, DSL, Wifi)

Fiddler or Network Emulator for Windows Toolkit perhaps. I'm sure there are other options though.

There is crapify [1]. I remember seeing other tools as well, but can't find them at the moment.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/crapify

I like "clumsy", which has a perfect animated GIF showing the app:

http://jagt.github.io/clumsy/index.html

This is great. Thanks.

Since nearly every Windows web dev has Fiddler2, it can simulate network latency: http://helephant.com/2012/07/11/simulating-network-latency-w...

I believe Fiddler handles this? Not very friendly to change, but it's documented here http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/KnowledgeBase/FiddlerScript/...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com