How to slow down a single directory for debugging?

Question

I'm currently trying to reproduce a bug that I think is caused by thread synchronization error.

Sadly the bug does only occurred on the customer site but not on my development machine.

Since those threads involve HDD access that is extremely slow at the customer site (about 1 MB/s) I think that the reason why I can't reproduce the bug is that my HDD is much faster.

Is there a tool that can slow down the access to a specified rate for a singe directory?

Solution

jdv pointed me to the WANem and it is by now the best solution. The setup is a bit demanding since it forces me to use 3 PCs to run my test (I wasn't able to run WANem in VMWare Player 3.0 due to network problems). However after I got all systems configured it works very well.

Answer 1

you can just try to slow down the code that access the directory instead of actually slowing down the directory. for example by throwing a few sleeps in strategic locations.

what is the problem you are seeing, and what language are you using?

Answer 2

You could put the files on a network share on another system (your colleague's), and map it on your system as a drive. Then force the bandwidth down to 10mbit (on the your colleage's machine preferably :) ).

So get lower speeds(or higher latency), use a WAN emulator: wanem.sourceforge.net/

Answer 3

1 MBps? Maybe you could force your NIC to 10 Mbps and map a network drive.