Tool to control windows network traffic (Internet Speed)

Question

I work on web development, therefore, in some rare situations I need to test our site and mimic different users' environments such as internet connection. Because if the internet connection is very slow or not stable, un-noticed errors pop up (e.g. one js script loads before the other), ajax request got interrupted, validation request timeout etc.

So for that I want a program to run on Windows 7/8 (7&8 is what I use mainly) to control the speed of the internet (transmission traffic).

Some of the features that I need:

Required:

1. Ability to adjust (limit) internet traffic for downloading.
2. Adjust traffic for the PC as a whole for all applications
3. To be free

Recommended but not required:

1. Adjust traffic (download + upload) for the whole system or for individual applications e.g. affect Firefox only, not Google Chrome.
2. Monitor traffic with summary of usage (how much data application X used in time N)
3. To be free (I only need this once every few month, so it's not worth it to buy a full license)

I've tried:

1. Netlimiter but I couldn't make it work for me.
2. NetBalancer but the trial has a limited functionality, therefore I couldn't test slowing down connection speed.

Most of the time I do my testing from localhost running XAMPP, so if the tool can control internal server speed that would be a big advantage.

To make this a bit more general and help fellow developers who got the same issue, you may mentioned as well a solution for other environments.

UPDATE [15-11-2014]

I just noticed with the new updates to Google's Chrome Developers tool - under the emulation section an option to emulate mobile device internet speed such as WIFI or 3G. More Details

Answer 1

[Promoting my comment to an answer...]

WANEM - The Wide Area Network emulator

Controlling Windows bandwidth within Windows is tricky; however, if you build a virtual machine with the Windows webserver in it, then you can do much more with wanem.

In your specific situation, you need:

• Windows VM with one virtual NIC
• Linux VM with two virtual NICs, (which would boot the wanem iso)

Jeremy Stretch describes the details of using wanem to control bandwidth / delay on his blog

Other options

• wansim
• Linux netem module in the kernel

Answer 2

I used Fiddler to simulate slow network speeds. At that time, I was using a Windows 7 box. However, at the bottom of the page, they since claim to support a variety of OSs (this covers the "other environments" suggestion).

By default, you have a preset to simulate "modem speeds". However, since Fiddler gives you access "under the hood", you can alter the corresponding scripts to further refine your experience. This tutorial is a good place to start.

Another check-mark on your list is the preference to be free.

I think you can set the speed caps per application, but I cannot recall now this detail, sorry.

As for the other points, I am afraid I wasn't particularly interested in those capabilities when I used it. You might want to check the supported plugins.

Answer 3

Clumsy is a nice portable application that can do network throttling as well as several other network traffic tampering operations.