One technique I’ve been using to speed up the loading of an ecommerce site is via ajax partitioning. For example, I programmed a product quickview function to view basic product information while still in the category, which not only is convenient for the customer but it loads tons faster as well. Today I’ve abstracted out the category view (pages with 50+ products and their images being listed).
Now, when designing such systems I follow the basic rules, one of which is a loading animation to give the user an interaction queue (aka, when they clicked it triggered an action)… However, me being only a single state away from the server and being on a business class broadband connection I find it hard to judge how users with lesser internet speeds and higher roundtrip delays are experiencing the site from an ajax point of view. And I can’t really use external tools for this type of thing either, as I’d like to know how the site feels are the user clicks around.
To that end, are there any tools that can be run locally that simulate higher network delays and lesser speeds? That would help me considerably.
Thanks!
What OS are you on? You can install Dummynet on Windows or Linux (and it is included in Mac) which will let you configure the latency, bandwidth and packet loss quite accurately.
It’s all configured through the command line but it’s not too bad once you get used to it (and it’s what WebPagetest uses for configuring the connectivity profiles).
Here is the home page for it: http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/dummynet/
Yes, I’m on Windows (7). That sounds exactly what I was looking for. I’ll let you know how it goes after I install it.
P.s. Command line is no problem, I often program command line utilities for myself (C++), so they’re no mystery to me!
One potential problem is that it’s only 32-bit for now. I have it on my to-do list to get it working on 64-bit (though Luigi has it working internally but without code signing).