Testing a slow connection

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Testing a slow connection

I am hearing of a report that my website crashes, when she is at home. She has not had a problem with the website in the past, and the only factor seems to come when she is at home, where her internet connection is dialup.

My site is only 140KB, but it does use Scriptaculous and jsMath libraries. The latter one has an error when loading. I suspect a race condition between these two.

Is there an easy way to throttle my own internet connection for testing purposes? I do run Windows on a VM for testing that platform. (Mac host) Throttling just the VM would be sufficient. It this a standard test that all websites should do?

Thanks, Dave

There are a couple of things to think about when a user says "crash":

Is it the network communication?

You can't really do much about this one. Its even hard to test this one.

Is it browser (client side) performance?

This, you can test. Test with multiple browsers, on multiple machines (some a lot slower than others), and on multiple OS's

Gabriel McAdams 2010-01-13 00:01:34

The user did not say crash. She said that a window appears on the bottom left of the screen saying "Loading jsMath" and it won't go away. The entire interface is locked up. She is running IE8 on Windows (Vista, or seven, I'm not sure). I as also told that quitting, and restarting the browser did not work.The "Loading jsMath" window is a function of that library, and not really a problem. It normally appears for <1 Sec though and goes away. I am working on the jsMath angle on sourceforge, but would like to know from the SO community if there is a way to test for a slower connection.

the Hampster 2010-01-14 19:01:55

First of all, I doubt this is a connection issue. I think its much more likely that it is a memory/CPU issue (the user's computer is slow). The only / best way to test how an application will perform on a slower computer is to get access to a slower computer and run your application.

Gabriel McAdams 2010-01-14 21:47:57

I looked at the jsMath JS files and I had another idea. In this other question I answered, the poster said that IE would freeze up (CPU at 100%) when they used document.write to add a script tag) - The answer was to use appendChild instead of document.write (this could be something you would relay to the people that wrote jsMath - or change it yourself) - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1985385/script-inside-javascript-code-document-write/2003509

Gabriel McAdams 2010-01-14 22:00:31

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