How to emulate a slow client (browser)?

Question

Is there a way to slow down the responsiveness of the client (browser)?

One of our testers can reproduce slowness on his machine. His car is quite low and looks like many real customers. We have a thick client, javascript is heavy, a lot of event handling. We fear that regression may occur, but it is immune to development machines.

The problem is text writing on input controls, tabs around the application seem to be delayed, and text writing sometimes omits the first character typed by the user.

Development cannot reproduce, is there a way to slow down the client or browser?

Answer 1

The browser may have the appropriate options.

For example, Firefox has:

• javascript.options.jit.content - set to false ;
• javascript.options.mem.gc_frequency - set it to a lower number.

Answer 2

You can create a virtual machine with very limited memory or just buy a crappy computer. They will not be so expensive!

Answer 3

Run something like HyperPI on the machine to slow it down: http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=211 (simple, non-standard solution)

Or run Crysis in the background.

Answer 4

If you have the Windows SDK installed, you can use the consume.exe tool to generate load on the machine.

It can generate a kernel load CPU / memory / disk / page file / kernel.