Oct 6th 2008 How the Other Half Lives - Bandwidth Throttling on the Mac Using WaterRoof/ipfw
Have you ever needed to test your website as if you were a dialup user? According to a Pew research study earlier this year 55% of Americans have broadband at home, and 10% still have dialup (with the remainder having no connectivity at home). This means that almost 20% of home browsers are on dialup. If you want to make sure that you’re app isn’t completely unusable for this population it could be useful to know how to slow your fat pipe down to dialup speeds.
Under the covers, Mac OSX uses a tool called “ipfw” (IP firewall) that allows for all kinds of fancy traffic shaping and piping. It’s a very unix tool though and it’s not the easiest thing to use if you’re not familiar with parsing through man pages.
There is a GUI called WaterRoof (http://www.hanynet.com/waterroof/) that makes things a little better, though it still isn’t the most intuitive thing.
Here are the steps to slow your connection down using WaterRoof.
Continue Reading »
No Comments » Posted by tednaleid / command line and osx