PLEASE NOTE: This tool has been taken offline and the code has been released as an open source project: modem-emulator. There's some background on the change here.
Some designers have taken the rise of broadband to mean that graphic intensive pages are now acceptable, that 600k Flash intros are suddenly desirable, and that otherwise bombarding the user with bandwidth-hungry sites is commendable. Sadly, plenty of users are still on dial-up, using 28k, 33.6k or 56k modems, and it's all too easy to forget that when you're surfing on a high speed office connection or even your home broadband.
With that in mind, I've put together a modem emulator (or is it a modem simulator?) throughput throttling proxy (apparently). In theory it should allow you to view your site through the eyes of a user with a slower connection. In practice, it isn't perfect, but might give you an idea of how some of your users actually experience your site.
A word of warning as well - the tool is tested (though not extensively) with sites that I use or have built. There will be unusual sites that don't work with this tool (flash is so far untested for example). Please email me if you have any problems.
The emulator suffered a great deal of abuse in the past, mainly by people wanting to bypass work internet filters. Unfortunately, that has meant that I have had to add a few features to the tool. The primary change, for my own sanity, is a blacklist of URLs. I hope to not have to change this to a whitelist, but that option is available should the need arise.
To use it, simply enter your URL and the speed you'd like to see the site go, and the script will show you the page desired loading as it would on a slower connection.
The tool has been taken offline, and the code has been released under an open source license. There's some background on the change here.
Finally, someone is bound to ask, so to save myself the time answering later - no, this cannot show you how your site will load on a faster connection than you have yourself :).
Update 29 December 2006
The emulator has been tentatively reinstated with some features to enable me to manage it.
65 Comments
[...] (someone is bound to ask, so to save myself the time answering later - no, this cannot show you how your site will load on a faster connection than you have yourself).
All hail! Acknowledgement to the existence of less intelligent beings! ;)
#1, Joen Olsen, Denmark, 16 July 2004. Reply to this.
How did you make this?
Can I get the source code or a link to a similar thing?
Thanks,
Trevor.
#2, Trevor, Australia, 16 March 2005. Reply to this.
This sucks! I was looking forward to have my pages checked.
Why can't pr0nsurfers just use anonymization tools instead of ruining my Thursday?
#3, Sigg3, Norway, 12 May 2005. Reply to this.
I know exactly what you mean, Sigg3. I haven't forgotten about this, but haven't had much time to work on solving the problem. I'll add you to the list of people that want to know when this is back online (I may end up just releasing the code in the end so people can set it up themselves).
#4, Dave Child, United Kingdom, 12 May 2005. Reply to this.
and i really needed to test out this flash video players bandwidth detection... maybe you could password protect the emulator and just give it out to a select few?
#5, joshua, United States, 16 June 2005. Reply to this.
Real shame that you have to take the emulator offline but I completely understand.
If moral objections aren't an issue you could offer for free to certain sites and use some of the revenue to let everyone else use it.
Come to think of it that wouldn't work either.Hmmm.
Best of luck in finding a solution.
#6, Ian Pritchard, United Kingdom, 6 August 2005. Reply to this.
how about making someone create a file in the same folder that the file try are trying to access. Basicly if they don't have access to the FTP then they shouldn't need to run the test.
#7, Matt, United Kingdom, 16 August 2005. Reply to this.
Hi Matt.
That would, most likely, prevent people accessing porn or warez. However, it renders the tool more or less useless anyway, as it then becomes such a chore to use. Nice idea though.
#8, Dave Child, United Kingdom, 16 August 2005. Reply to this.
If you would like I can offer you an ftp where you can mirror the emulator. I own several dedicated servers, and have the bandwidth to spare. You can reach me at mike -at- nextdesigns -dot net.
#9, Metalp3n, United States, 20 September 2005. Reply to this.
Like Trevor, I would also like to know how you made this.
Livin' Dead Productions is an art/web design/film-maker/do-what-we-want/etc. site and I would benefit from knowing how our art loads on slow connections.
#10, Bobby Ryterski, United States, 16 November 2005. Reply to this.
Adding myself to the list of disappointed folks. Was looking forward to testing this new design on your tool, and BAM! Darned Intertron usurpers.
Anyhow, thanks for the emulator. It was a great tool and will be missed.
#11, Sabin Densmore, United States, 1 December 2005. Reply to this.
Hey, that's too bad that a few sketchy morons who can't wait to get home ruined this seemingly great tool. Hell, I'd be up for coding a system that might track abusers and deny them access to this. Any interest in that?
rob - dot - sterner *at* bitgroup - dot - com
#12, junglist_codah, United States, 15 December 2005. Reply to this.
Is a little disappointed also, but we can't expect you to use your bandwidth for it.
Releasing the source code could be a great solution, a copy on my own server would be great anyway, whether there were others online.
#13, Audigex, United Kingdom, 21 December 2005. Reply to this.
If you use nix; you can use qos to limit the bandwidth for the server. I have additional qos methods than shown here but the barebones below would allow you to slowdown your web traffic. Modify the following to your needs:
IF_LINK=25 #in kbps
tc qdisc del dev $IF root 2> /dev/null > /dev/null
tc qdisc del dev $IF ingress 2> /dev/null > /dev/null
tc qdisc add dev $IF root handle 1: htb default 90
tc class add dev $IF parent 1: classid 1:1 htb rate \ ${IF_LINK}kbit ceil ${IF_LINK}kbit
tc class add dev $IF parent 1:1 classid 1:90 htb rate \ ${IF_LINK}kbit ceil ${IF_LINK}kbit
$IPTABLES -t mangle -D POSTROUTING -o $IF -j QOSOUT
$IPTABLES -t mangle -F QOSOUT
$IPTABLES -t mangle -X QOSOUT
$IPTABLES -t mangle -N QOSOUT
$IPTABLES -t mangle -I POSTROUTING -o $IF -j QOSOUT
#Here is where we put the traffic filter
$IPTABLES -t mangle -A QOSOUT -p tcp --sport 80 -j CLASSIFY --set-class 1:90
#14, Eddy, Canada, 16 January 2006. Reply to this.
Please add me to the list of people who'd like to know when this is live again (or source code is released). Sounds like a very useful tool to have.
#15, Adam Messinger, United States, 23 January 2006. Reply to this.
"Please add me to the list of people who'd like to know when this is live again (or source code is released). Sounds like a very useful tool to have."
And me, too- please. It is truly a useful tool to have
#16, search-engine-marketing, United Kingdom, 13 February 2006. Reply to this.
Have a block list, check the domain against a the block list, if you don't get a hit fetch the page and check if for keywords related to porn, etc. If it gets a match the site goes on the block list.
Occationally you will get an innocent site on the list so create an OK list which you can add to if you ask someone too.
#17, Matt, United Kingdom, 5 March 2006. Reply to this.
This is not a modem emulator or simulator, its a throughput throttling proxy. (Unless you actually use Phase Shift Keying to encode the binary signal, and transmit it over a voip connection to a dial-up ISP or something) Quite misleading name...
#18, Coder, Ireland, 13 March 2006. Reply to this.
I really like that last comment :]
Shame this had to go offline, probably a good tool to make avaialbe so people could upload it to their own space, if this was possible. I am going to have a quick surf to see if there is a tool like this about as im sure there is :]
If its any help the webdeveloper toolbar is available for FF users, has a few handy tools that show you how big your page is...
http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/
#19, Toby, United Kingdom, 24 March 2006. Reply to this.
Can't you release the script on the site so we, who have our own server, can put up a mirror?
#20, HKB, Denmark, 22 May 2006. Reply to this.
If anyone knows of another source for modem simulators (or throughput throttling proxies), please post a URL. It sounds like a very useful tool (for legitimate reasons, of course)
addedbytes.com: Thank you for your contribution, but at this point it looks like we'll have to look elsewhere.
#21, Malone, Canada, 5 July 2006. Reply to this.
Thanks for the prior use, pity its not here any longer but so much time has passed that it looks like it has gone for ever. I can't find any others either (sad face).
#22, Bluebottle, New Zealand, 7 September 2006. Reply to this.
I ran across Internet Speed Simulator / Proxy throttler http://www.ngcoders.com/downloads/internet-speed-simulator-proxy-throttler/ while searching for a throttling proxy. I haven't tried it so I won't vouch for it.
#23, Mr. Muskrat, United States, 29 December 2006. Reply to this.
Nice tool. I just have one small problem. I use @import for my stylesheets, but I don't use quotes instead of url() to hide my stylesheets from IE4 etc. (e.g. <style>@import "/styles/main.css";</style>)
These url's don't get 'translated' to the 'proxy'-url.
Otherwise it seems to work okay, but it's slow as a tortoise :-P
#24, Gerben, Netherlands, 29 December 2006. Reply to this.
It is a touch slow, yes. :)
I've fixed the @import issue - thanks for letting me know about it.
#25, Dave Child, United Kingdom, 29 December 2006. Reply to this.
For those of you who can't use this proxy to test your web apps (like me), I googled for 'throttling proxy' and found a few more interesting things.
I ran across information on using mod_throttle with Apache 1.3 however the authors no longer want any thing to do with it.
I also found another Apache module that actually looks quite promising: mod_bwshare 0.2.0 bandwidth throttling by HTTP client IP address. http://www.topology.org/src/bwshare/README.html
#26, Mr. Muskrat, United States, 29 December 2006. Reply to this.
Their is also a nice Java Bandwidth Throttler called Sloppy. It's free, you can just save and run it from your desktop, and it emulates any speed you want :) You can snag it here: http://www.dallaway.com/sloppy/. It's especially nice when trying to build Flash Preloaders because it can be used locally too (as in you can hit localhost through this sloppy app)
#27, Smashing Directory, Unknown, 15 January 2007. Reply to this.
I'd like to thank you for this great tool. It the first and only web-based tool I could find and it works real well. My site http://www.ticketdugout.com loaded better than I expected on 56k.
#28, Jeff, United States, 20 January 2007. Reply to this.
dial up people don't matter - get real.
#29, travis, United States, 26 January 2007. Reply to this.
Crudely put, travis. Not to excuse your obvious naivety, you do unintentionally raise an interesting question - how many people are still on dial up?
In the UK (where I'm from), broadband penetration is fairly high, at 75% of 14 million households (as of Q3 2006). I'll help you with the maths here, travis - that means that there are 3.5 million households in the UK with dialup. That's upwards, by my reckoning, of 10 million potential customers. And that's the UK only. The US (where you're from, travis) is pretty similar at just under 75% broadband penetration as of Q2 2006. That's 1 in 4 potential customers still on dial-up.
Let's not forget, as well, that many people get broadband for FASTER internet access, not so web designers can stuff their sites with oversized image and pointless fluff.
Now, what does the future hold? Broadband is now very very cheap - will everyone be on it one day? Possibly. Though let's not forget the mobile market, which dwarfs the ISP market and is still growing (and as far as the intenet goes is still finding its feet). The mobile market is a pay-per-byte style service. Small sites are cheaper. Connections are, currently, very slow, so small sites will, again, be better for mobile users.
If you can't see why file sizes are still not only relevant, but hugely important, online, travis, then I suggest you find topics you are actually knowledgable about on which to voice your opinions in future.
#30, Dave Child, United Kingdom, 26 January 2007. Reply to this.
Dave, you totally owned that guy. I like the information you presented to support your position (broadband penetration and the mobile market) and subtly but surely pwnerated his ignorant comment when you didn't have to. I have a small design shop in Oregon and I have found your site very useful. (<3 cheat sheets ) . Thanks for this tool and your efforts to provide valuable resources to the webdev community.
#31, Joey White, United States, 27 January 2007. Reply to this.
Agree with Travis. Let's force those dial-up f...ers to get some cloth on and get on with the party. Sick of playing the catchup game. I'll be damned if I take them Bertha's huge pictures off my site.
#32, Agree., United States, 29 January 2007. Reply to this.
Please update your tool for us 14.4 user. We have been discriminated for so long...
#33, Newspaperboy, Denmark, 29 January 2007. Reply to this.
Thank you so much for providing this tool. It's been great to see where I could improve performance for my clients.
#34, Robin, Canada, 31 January 2007. Reply to this.
Great tool, thank you very much. It's a real eye-opener (or closer?) waiting for a nice newly developed site to load....(yawn)..........(nods off).............
#35, Mike, United Kingdom, 31 January 2007. Reply to this.
This makes for a great tool. I?ve been scouring the web and once again ?JD? has led me down the right path, I too love Jack Daniels. I would love to have the source so I wouldn?t have to beat up your server all the time.
I work for a local ISP in rural America who provides both wireless and dialup internet access, half of whose users are still on dialup. Rural areas in America seem to be a little behind the technological times when compared to the ?penetration? data presented above. As some previous posters have mentioned, the internet is growing and high speed connections are becoming more and more prevalent. Even though, conventional ignorance would lead one to believe (little to no offence intended, Travis) that users paying for a high speed connection would love to be bombarded by high resolution images of your kitten being chased by Domo-Kun, or your buddies passed out on your couch with black marker obscenities written all over their foreheads, the reality is probably not as apparent. I, and apparently many others agree that users subscribe to high speed internet services so they can access the same thing faster. You wouldn?t buy a fast car to pull a semi-trailer, would you? Certain exceptions to this philosophy are also becoming readily apparent, such as the video on demand services offered by so many media organizations now. High speed access provides an acceptable download time by comparison, you could just drive to the video store and have returned the video by the time a download would have finished with dialup.
Lets not forget those who live in the lesser traveled back roads sometimes distant from the information superhighway and may not even have access to high speed connection options.
#36, Erik, United States, 2 February 2007. Reply to this.
(on xp) you could use a tool like fiddlerproxy with a couple of custom rules to simulate speeds and latencies.
(on linux, or xp via linux gateway)or you could run linux, and use shaper with cbq, then just enable internet connection sharing. You get a high degree of cusomisation with this type of rule, throttling for just the IP of your server, starting and stopping shaper takes a second.
(your root on apache server) or use mod throttle, or mod_bw and throttle by IP, mime/type etc..
#37, matt, soton, uk, United Kingdom, 8 February 2007. Reply to this.
So why, when I use the tool, does the picture at the left never appear?
#38, Brandon Sussman, United States, 8 February 2007. Reply to this.
Sorry - it didn't occur to me that I needed to make the URI more obvious - click my name got go directly.
#39, Brandon Sussman, United States, 8 February 2007. Reply to this.
A family friend dropped off and old pentium2 at my place, she bascially wanted me to clear her data off the harddrive before dumping it....
But it has a 28k modem!! it also runs a copy of some ancient browser and has less RAM then a calculator and a processer that only just beats a manual abacus.
It might be a hassle to have a dialup connection sitting there mostly unused, but heck - its a damn accurate "simulation"
Now I'm just waiting for my post to get torn to shreds like so many others....
- Jeremy
#40, Jeremy, New Zealand, 14 February 2007. Reply to this.
Erm, Did not find my sites, so I tried msn.com and that doesn't load either, I huess that at 56k most of the www is unavailable?
#41, Alexis Svenn, United Kingdom, 29 March 2007. Reply to this.
Not the www is missing, the 56k.php script which is used for slow-down is missing...
#42, tenochtitlan, Unknown, 2 April 2007. Reply to this.
ok, all slow-down scripts do not work^^
#43, tenochtitlan, Unknown, 2 April 2007. Reply to this.
My apologies - it appears the script used by the emulator went missing. I didn't delete it, so either there's a bug in it that allows some unscrupulous type to delete the script, or I deleted it accidentally, or my hosts deleted it. I'll try and find out which.
In the meantime the script is back and working. If you have any problems, please email me at dave@addedbytes.com.
#44, Dave Child, United Kingdom, 3 April 2007. Reply to this.
Hi, neat tool but it doesn't seem to like Flash :(
#45, Matt, United Kingdom, 11 April 2007. Reply to this.
Nice tool, but not work with flash.
I download a program based in desktop app and work with java, it called sloppy, this work with flash and html.
try search in google.
#46, Ruben Rojas, Venezuela, 26 April 2007. Reply to this.
see in www.dallaway.com/sloppy/
#47, Ruben Rojas, Unknown, 26 April 2007. Reply to this.
Since when was 28k or 56k popular? Broadband has taken over the UK, and you'd have to question if organisations aren't using a connection above 56k are actually worth doing business with if they're that behind the times!
I'm all for accessibility, but this appears to be a bit of pro-accessiblity masturbation. I'm not pointing the finger at you, but i can't help that stuff like this is scare mongering.
#48, Rob, United Kingdom, 1 June 2007. Reply to this.
Rob: Stats indicate around 20-25% of users in the UK are still using dial-up. Use of mobiles is on the increase. And people don't get broadband, as a rule, so they can have more junk thrown at them. A lot of people get broadband so they can view the same web faster. And surprisingly enough not every website is there to deal with organisations. Some actually deal with people.
#49, Dave Child, United Kingdom, 1 June 2007. Reply to this.
Make an FireFox extension with this features to local server page debugging will be wonderful!!!
#50, Israel, Cuba, 15 June 2007. Reply to this.
It could be wonderful if it will as Flash, as for me.
#51, Artem, Unknown, 21 July 2007. Reply to this.
Do you have any plans as of now to publish the source code so that others may implement this?
#52, Siriusfox, United States, 30 July 2007. Reply to this.
Incredible tool. thank you so much 'Jack' ;).
#53, Xavez, Belgium, 6 September 2007. Reply to this.
Excellent tool. Will certainly use it to do some testing myself. Would love to take a peek under the hood at the source and get it running locally!
#54, Matt, United States, 7 September 2007. Reply to this.
I was reading another thread elsewhere about BW and started linking about how my dial up customers saw my sites. I have long tried to ensure text came first on a page then small pictures then bigger ones. Your proxy tool provides a great service and those posters above that be-little people without xDSL have no idea that a great number on people with money to spend on this planet do not live in cities and places close enough to get xDSL without getting a satellite feed - in the mean time they can come and buy from me and my slow friendly site. Thank you Dave C - a great help.
#55, Drone, United Kingdom, 5 October 2007. Reply to this.
Don't know if the code of my site is so weird, but viewing it through the emulator all the background-images were missing. Or is this deliberate ? Otherwise I think the emulator is fantastic and a great idea, for sure .. thanks !
#56, Anonymous, Germany, 13 November 2007. Reply to this.
Where do I download the tool. There is no download link?
#57, Francois du Toit, Unknown, 11 December 2007. Reply to this.
Reminds me of when I had dial up... Oh my god! Pictures!
#58, Niko Kruzel, Canada, 11 March 2008. Reply to this.
Awesome tool! One question though... Does your "emulator" support gzip compression? As in, does it send the proper headers so that the server being tested sees it as a compression-enabled browser? The reason I ask is that the pages I'm testing seem to load at nearly the same speed, with or without compression. I even see a noticeable difference viewing those same pages directly over my cable connection, so the lack of any noticeable difference viewing them through your emulator has me wondering about compression support.
#59, Bryan Avery, United States, 23 April 2008. Reply to this.
Just came across this url after about 8 months. Recently I've been working with mobile phones a lot and just thought surely a good option would also be speeds to mimik GPRS, EDGE and 3G connections.
Am still wanting to see the source code too!
#60, Matt, United Kingdom, 4 May 2008. Reply to this.
Hi,
The emulator appears to be not working.
#61, Anonymous, United Kingdom, 18 May 2008. Reply to this.
Hello! This tool seem to be not working due to endless loop of redirections. My Firefox told me about this. IE just told that the page cannot be displayed.
Try to fix some settings please. I have used the emulator before and i find it useful. Thus i'd prefer to use it again.
Thanks
#62, Andrew, Unknown, 2 June 2008. Reply to this.
This tool has been taken offline, and the code has been updated and released as a Google Code project at http://code.google.com/p/modem-emulator/
More information on this change is available at http://www.addedbytes.com/blog/modem-emulator-open-sourced/
#63, DaveChild, United Kingdom, 18 July 2008. Reply to this.
so... how do I open the file?? I downloaded the php but it makes no sense. how i open it??
#64, Jesse, 26 September 2010. Reply to this.
Oh really?
How about I download all headers first, buffer them, and after show to the user as a stream simulating downloading in supper fast connections?
Less intelligent?
#65, Really?, 25 November 2011. Reply to this.