Slowing down a web connection to test Flash loaders
From dis-Emi-A
Your code will likely have several places where external resources are being loaded and often they will have progress bars, or some sort of indicator showing that it is loading.
If your code is nicely abstract you can partially test this by substituting a dummy loader behind the progress bar. This is of course isn't a perfect test, and it requires instrumentation.
An alternate solution is to simply reduce the speed of your web server.
NOTE: Depending on your familiarity with server setup this may or may not be a complex solution.
Apache mod_cband
You will need an Apache server already setup on your machine to use this solution. You of course already have one, since you are testing Flash after all... ;)
The mod_cband module was created to allow virtual hosting providers to control the bandwidth individual connections, or specific hosts are allowed to get. mod_cband is a standard Debian package so you should be able to install it quickly, and then just link it in mods-enabled.
You will need to have a named virtual host for this to work (it does not work over the entire website). That is, you'll need a <VirtualHost> entry with a ServerName directive. I found this worked well since I have my main test site and also created a "slow.local" website to test the slow connection.
Then in the VirtualHost add a setting such as:
CBandSpeed 150kb/s 3 3
That says to limit the speed to 150kb/s and set a maximum of 3 open connections (I can't remember what the second 3 is for, but they may be of interest for multiple connection testing).
Now simply load your SWF from this local server and you'll see the bandwidth throttled down to 150kb/s. If you want to go even slower be aware of the broken loading defect.
Apache mod_bw
This is an alternate option that allows fine-grained control over specific filetypes, but I have not tried it.
Other Options
I've been informed of the following options as well. Note that Proxy options test slightly differently than web server control, but are usually fine -- though I'm not sure you can configure a proxy in the standalone player.
- Sloppy
- Java based web proxy
- Fiddler
- Debugging proxy (view traffic)
- Charles Proxy
- not free, but looks specialized for Flash
