Is there a way to simulate network bottlenecks or slow networks?

[trmiv]

My boss needs me to test something that one of our customers is having a problem with. Basically the problem is caused by their network either being slow, or having a bottleneck somewhere. It is possible for us to optimize our software to help them, but we need to be able to test it out before we send it off to them. We cannot replicate their problem because our network is 100 Mb without too many clients, so everything is fast.

Anyway, I want to be able to simulate their problem. I was thinking of settting up a few computers on a hub, and somehow simulate a slow network or network bottleneck. Is there some kind of application that can do this, or some way to set this up?

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

Well, you can set one or more of the NIC's in 10mbit/Half-Duplex mode, that will be slower. If, in addition to that, you start a job in the background copying a multi-gigabyte file, the network will be snail-like in response!

 

[trmiv]

I doubt 10 Mb will be slow enough on a network this small, I think it would still work fine. What I'm looking for is a way to choke down the bandwidth seletively. I could swear hearing about some software that could do this, but I can't seem to find it now.

 

[Matthias99]

I would think that most bandwidth shaping software would have this capability, but I'm not too familiar with using it. Try a search for "bandwidth shaping".

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

I think you'll find that doing a large file transfer will really slow things down. If you want a terminally slow network, I'd suggest you consider something like a PPP link over a serial line...

 

[Garion]

The only folks that do this, that I know of, is Shunra Software.. They have both appliances and installable software that works VERY well for this kind of thing. Not cheap, however!

- G

 

[trmiv]

Those apps from Shunra look like what I'm looking for, doubt my boss would pay for it though!

 

[nAeS]

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