Bandwidth Throttling in Web Browser
As we all know Internet speed across the world is not same & whatever you see as statistics regarding internet speed of a country is the average speed across that specific country and cannot be taken as its minimum speed of the country/region.
Most of the time developers tend to forget about the speed of the network. Even if someone is an API developer or Website developer, they tend to check/test from functional perspective. REST/SOAP API developers usually use the common technique of pagination by which client application can play with the number of records downloaded/pulled from the API & it helps to a certain extent.
There are various other things which needs to be considered by the client applications and one among them is throttling the speed at client side (Web Browser) and see how the Webpage behaves in slow network connections & experience how the end user is going to feel it.
Bandwidth throttling is the intentional slowing or speeding of an internet service by an Internet service provider. It is a reactive measure employed in communication networks to regulate network traffic and minimize bandwidth congestion. Bandwidth throttling can occur at different locations on the network — Wikipedia
All Web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge...) nowadays come with an inbuilt feature of throttling the speed of the network.
Let's see how this can be achieved in Google’s chrome web browser.
- Open Developer tools by using Command+Option+I in Mac & F12 or Control+Shift+I in Windows/Linux
- Navigate to “Network” tab & in it look for the Option “Online” which means it is not throttled.
If you open the dropdown option, you might find predefined options to throttle the speed.
You can also configure your own using the “Add” option and you can configure Download, Upload & Latency.
Similar kinds of features exist in other web browsers as well. Here are some of the custom speeds which you can configure.
