bandwidth and traffic simulator for web apps?

Question

Can you suggest how to create a test environment to simulate various types of bandwidths and traffic in a web app?

Or maybe an open source program which does this against

Answer 1

We use Loadrunner to do bandwidth and traffic simulation in our App. Loadrunner is can start agents on various machines and you can simulate one machine as running on dialup modem v/s another on DSL v/s another on Cable internet. We also use Loadrunner to simulate various kinds of traffic conditions from 10 user run to 500 user run. We can also insert think times in the script and simulate a real user executing the http request. The best part is that it comes with a recording studio where it will plug in with Internet explorer and you can record the whole scenario/Usecase that can be as simple as hitting one page to a full blown 50-60 page script or more.