When testing an application or service, it can be very useful to simulate degraded network conditions. This allows you to see how they might perform for real users. Testing on a controlled LAN is not always realistic, since the LAN has much different network properties than a real user would experience over a WAN.

I will give examples using 2 tools that alter a network interface's properties. The tools are: NetEm and Wondershaper.

NetEm is an enhancement of the Linux traffic control facilities that allows you to add delay, packet loss, duplication, corruption, reordering, and more to outgoing packets from a specified network interface. NetEm is controlled by the command line tool tc, which is part of the iproute2 package and included in most Linux distros.

Wondershaper is a traffic shaping script that allows you to throttle network transfers on a specified network interface. This is useful for testing latency when bandwidth is limited.

Examples:

tc/NetEm:

add fixed 250ms delay to all outgoing packets on Ethernet interface eth1:

$ sudo tc qdisc add dev eth1 root netem delay 250ms

turn it off:

$ sudo tc qdisc del dev eth1 root netem 

Wondershaper:

limit bandwidth of eth1 interface to 256kbps upload and 128kbps download:

$ sudo wondershaper eth1 256 128

turn it off:

$ sudo wondershaper clear eth1