How can I simulate a slow connection for page load?

Question

I have a fast server, and a reasonably fast home Internet connection. How can I simulate my page loading on a slow connection?

Answer 1

FireFox Throttle is a FireFox extension that should do it. Sloppy is a proxy which slows down your connection so it should work across browsers.

Source: http://www.devcurry.com/2010/07/simulate-slow-internet-connections.html

MODERATOR EDIT 2013-02-02

This extension is no longer available.

Answer 2

Fiddler Web Debugger is an excellent HTTP proxy debugging tool for Windows that includes a modem speed simulation feature (Main menu > Rules > Performance > simulate modem speed).
Fiddler is freeware.

I also like Charles Web Debugging Proxy, a similar tool. Charles can also throttle the connection speed. Charles is commercial software, but has a free trial available. What I like most about Charles is that it is cross-platform: Being Java-based, it can run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. (You didn't mention which platform you're on, but it's probably one of those :-)

Answer 3

Try out http://www.webpagetest.org/test. You can run a test from any of their remote servers around the world and see how fast you page loads from those location. It will even let you use a dial-up speed or other slow speeds for most locations.

Answer 4

You can slow down specific resources with Deelay.me:

<img src="http://deelay.me/1000?http://mysite.com/image.gif">

Deelay.me is a delay proxy for web resources. You can use it with your images/stylesheets/scripts, to increase their load time.

Answer 5

A quick & dirty solution is to upload a large file to try to choke your outbound bandwidth, this should slow down your inbound connection, and is usually easier than trying to similarly choke inbound bandwidth.

Answer 6

You can emulate various net speeds on a Mac using an free application called Speedlimit

Speedlimit Description:

SpeedLimit is a Leopard preference pane for limiting your network bandwidth to one of a couple different speeds — 768k DSL, Edge, 3G, and Dialup. This is really handy for testing your iPhone app under normal Edge network conditions in the iPhone Simulator.