I have been working on enhancing network performance for the upcoming Firefox on Mobile. I jokingly refer to this work as "finding useful things to do with latency" as the browser is targeted at cell phone networks. These networks have latencies of hundreds, sometimes over a thousand, milliseconds.
From time to time I hope to talk on this blog about interesting things I have found or done while looking into this.
One of the cool things I consed up in the effort is a python script to emulate one of these networks over localhost. Just run the script, along with an XML file that describes the network you're looking to simulate, and then you can run any networking application you want across localhost to measure the impact of any potential changes you want to make.
The script relies on netem and ifb. In that sense, it doesn't really add anything fundamental by itself. Those are outstanding, but poorly understood tools.
By rolling that together in a script, and providing XML profiles for 3G, edge, bluetooth, evdo, hspd, and gprs wireless networks I was able to provide a meaningful testbed for evaluating default preferences for concurrency and pipeline depth, as well as the impact of changes to DNS pre-fetching and the pipelining implementation. All good stuff. Some of them need their own posts.
If you're interested in the tool - this is the release announcement. It is bundled as part of my local copy of the firefox development tree, but the tool is easily separable from that for use on something else.
