Take the 2-minute tour ×

Is there any way to slow down the responsiveness of the client (browser)?

One of our testers can reproduce slowness on his machine. His machine is low enough spec and is similar to many real customers. We have a fat client, javascript heavy, alot of event processing. We fear there maybe a regression but it's unreporoducable on developer machines.

The issue is text entry on input controls, tabbing around the app would appear to get delay and the text entry sometimes omits the first character typed by the user.

Development cannot reproduce, is there any way to slow down the client or the browser?

share|improve this question
you could tell the OS to give the browser's process a low priority (and if that's not enough, make sure there is something crunching some CPU at the same time), and if there are multiple cores involved you could allow access to only one core for example, although to properly model bad performance, there is nothing more real than a genuinely poor machine... –  davin Feb 25 '11 at 13:44
add comment

4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

The browser may have relevant options.

For instance, Firefox has:

share|improve this answer
add comment

You could create a virtual machine with very limited memory, or just purchase a crappy PC. They wont cost that much!

share|improve this answer
Having as many old machines, with out of date OS's and software, as possible is a real help in testing real code. As you say, they are cheap to buy, and a good use for old hardware you have outgrown. –  kennebec Feb 25 '11 at 14:08
add comment

Run something like HyperPI on the machine to slow it down: http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=211 (simple, unelegant solution)

Or run Crysis in the background.

share|improve this answer
Crysis idea is brilliant! –  Stuart Branham Aug 9 '11 at 17:58
add comment

If you have the windows SDK installed, you can use the consume.exe tool to generate load on the machine.

It can generate CPU/memory/disk/page file/kernel pool load.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


