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I have a requirement to test various resilient file transfer methods that need to work across an extremely slow and intermittently unreliable network. I have a server and a client available to test the transfer from/to but I need a way to throttle the bandwidth on the client machine to simulate the poor network. I have seen there are various tools to throttle bandwidth in Chrome dev tools, for example, but I want to do it globally for the whole of the client machine's connection so I can be assured that the various transfer methods can cope gracefully with a slow network.

Has anyone got any suggestions/methodologies I can use to achieve this?

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BEST SOLUTION: Use wondershaper (linux):

wondershaper [interface] [down] [up], that in your case it's going to be:

wondershaper eth0 256 128 -- that equals to 256kbps in down and 128kbps in up.

You could set the NIC on your client to work at 10 mbit/s

Windows:

Device Manager > Right-Click NIC > Advanced >
> Speed & Duplex > Set "10 Mbps Full Duplex" or "10 Mbps Half Duplex"

Linux:

apt-get install ethtool
ethtool -s eth0 speed 10 duplex half (or duplex full, your choice) autoneg off
ip set dev eth0 down && ip set dev eth0 up --OR-- ifconfig eth0 up && ifconfig eth0 up

You could just hog the bandwidth with random file transfer between the server and client and while they're running run the desired test.

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  • It's a good idea, thanks. But I need it to go even slower than that - we are talking dial-up speeds really - it's a very poor connection that needs to be simulated. I guess I can flood the connection with noise, as you say, and hog the bandwidth that way but I need something that is consistent, reliable and repeatable as I need to test several different file transfer methods against one another. I was hoping I could just globally limit the network connection to 1mbit/s and have done with it.
    – filbert
    Jan 15, 2019 at 15:01
  • You can use wondershaper in that case: wondershaper [interface] [down] [up], in your case it would be: "wondershaper eth0 256 128" -- that equals to 256kbps in down and 128 in up
    – Jes7err
    Jan 15, 2019 at 15:06

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