There are scenarios when you'd want to throttle your connection to simulate inferior connectivity. For instance you'd like to see how your application is going to behave when working with a slow network connection. There are complex methods available but I found some simpler ways to achieve this:

For applications running on some standard protocol such as HTTP you can easily introduce a proxy such as squid to control the rate of traffic. At a higher level, it becomes even simpler in browsers with plugins such as Firefox Throttle and IE Throttle.

However if you want to test a standalone application in which it is not possible to introduce a proxy, you can throttle the network traffic at the lower layer of the network stack.

In Linux, it is possible to introduce throttling at interface level using traffic shaping. You can write traffic shaping rules to control the traffic; however I've found those rules a bit co 6885994496 mplex. There are scripts available that can do the job for you. One good such script is

The most useful tool I found for network throttling was wondershaper. It worked like a charm for me. Installing it was as simple as "sudo apt-get install wondershaper" on Ubuntu. Usage is very straightforward:

wondershaper eth0 500 500 # Limits the network traffic on eth0
interface to 500 kbps
wondershaper clear eth0 # Clears throttling

For Windows there are commercial tools available such as NetFilter.