What exactly does Enable Bandwidth Throttling do?

[LesleyW]

Well the title says it all really.

I had a problem with my site in the live environment (which I can't get to or amend easily) where it seemed to take ages to load the first page. It was not happening in the development environment because it is much much faster, but I thought I knew what was missing. I couldn't test it however because the development environment is too fast!

A colleague suggested that I could turn on Enable Bandwidth Throttling in my development environment, set it down to 6 or 7, and then when I accessed the site it would be similar speed wise to accessing it via a modem. This would therefore slow down the site enough for me to see if the slowness of first page load was still a problem.

It didn't seem to slow down the loading of the first page from the development environment at all. And reading in MSDN environment about it I don't think it can achieve this.

Can anyone say whether my colleague is talking sense or not?

 

[kwagner]

Bandwidth throttling is a means of controling multiple connections bandwidth speeds. Say for instance your box has a 10 meg bandwidth max level, and I have a 10 meg connection (it would be nice) You have a 100 gig file I want. Well, when I connect and I start downloading that file my 10 meg connection is sucking all of your 10 meg cap level. that means no one else can now access your site or download or even upload to your box because I'm utilizing your cap level of bandwidth. If you set the throttling for 1,024 kb/sec any connection can can only (at the max) use 10% of your cap level. That is about the simpliest way I can put it.

 

[LesleyW]

Thank you Kwagner. I think from what you say that my colleague had misunderstood its purpose. Your explanation was great though I understood it much better than any of the stuff on the "technical" sites.