SPOF is fine, but that SP is also a single point of delay. If the server is responding but very slowly then the impact on the page is still bad, and if they’re really slow it’s worse than SPOF because the browser won’t timeout.
So, I see you can specify the overall connection speed in the Test Settings tab but I’d like to do this on a per-host basis. I’d then like to do the video comparison just like the SPOF video does an excellent job of.
I can’t do this directly but if you want to put a few pieces together you should be able to. You basically just need a server that can accept requests for arbitrary objects and then take however long you want before returning (or never returning). Then you can use the setDnsName and overrideHost commands to redirect the domains in question to your custom server.
If you want to get really fancy you can have your server fetch the original resource and proxy it through but if you’re just looking for a long delay you could simply return a 204 after however long you want to hold things up.
The behavior should look a lot like a SPOF, just with the timeout being variable (from shorter to infinitely long).
Hi Pat, building on your blackhole work (oh btw, never search for “blackhole server” in work, bad idea) i created a number of stubs.
slow.mydomain.org
big.mydomain.org
bignslow.mydomain.org
blackhole.mydomain.org
These end points return data (or not as their name suggests) and allows me to stub out the SPOFs.
So how will my site behave if facebook are up, but returning some huge payload very slowly?
I use these with an internal WPT instance running in CI.
all the best,
p.s i missed you in London, i still owe you a beer!