Sometimes it’s useful to test your web application for situations where internet connections are less than stellar. It turns out that Mac OS X has a builtin utility called ipfw than, among other things, can do just this.
I first saw this technique from Joe Miller’s post on the subject. I packaged up the settings he mentioned into a little shell script:
You can drop that somewhere in your $PATH and chmod +x to make it executable. You can call it whatever you want, but I called mine “hinder”. After that, it’s simply a matter of using it:
$ hinder www.google.com
Now when you visit google.com, you should see some marked slowness. To reset, just run:
$ hinder reset
Google is now fast again.
The script works by adding 250ms delay to both directions of network traffic. It also adds a packet-loss percentage of 10%. You can play with these numbers to get even more latency simulation. Enjoy!