Connection Behavior HowTo

With the GUI running, but before you click start, notice the settings in the upper-right hand corner of the window, such as "latency," "throttle," and so forth. Each of these can be used alone or in conjunction with the others. To enable one, check its checkbox and enter a value.

Say for example that some of your user base accesses your web site over a satellite link - a brokerage house I worked for had this setup. You can simulate what they see by estimating the travel delay for an electromagnetic signal to reach the satellite and return to Earth. In our case, it was about 239 milliseconds for the trip up and back. This is a rough estimate, of course, but it's close enough to experience what the user experiences. Check the checkbox, and enter 239 milliseconds for the delay. Notice the impact this has one your site - often it's quite dramatic. Now you can better construct your application to be friendly in the environment your users have.

You can also limit the bandwith using the throttle control. You can simulate packet locket (although it's not really the same as what you would see for packets lost due to hardware failures), and you can force connection to be dropped. If you check the connection loss checkbox, you'll notice that the Close and Open buttons are enabled while the proxy runs. Clicking Close will dopr all connections and prevent new connections from being made. Click Open to re-enable connectivity.