Limit bandwith to simulate slow internet connections

RouterOS General
1

Hello,

I’m new to Mikrotik Devices and bought a RouterBoard RB750 with RouterOS Version 5.24.

At the moment I would like to measure the page speed of several internet sites with internet connections of different speed (e.g. 20.000 MBit/s versus 5.000 MBit/s). In Winbox there is a menu called Queues, where I created a simple queue with corresponding values for “Rx Max Limit” and “Tx Max Limit”. Now I use Firefox with FireBug-AddOn to measure the page speed(On Load). But of course I can also use Safari TimeLine or Chrome to get additional measured values.

Is this Mirotik-Setup reliable to give a clear view to the page speed depending on the internet connection speed? Of course i know that there can be additional influences like Server-Load, CMS-Configuration, etc…But I want to know if i can just calculate the absolute loading time and say something like “When using 5.000 instead of 20.000 MBit/s you have to wait an average of x more seconds until the page is shown”?

What about latency? Is there a way to simulate a mobile broadband connection versus a fixed landline connection, or does this have only a marginal influence on the results?

Greetings,
Mops

2

I recommend reading http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028048.do for a good discussion on bandwidth vs latency vs page load times. The short answer is that latency is a prime concern.

You can use a Mikrotk router to test a variety of bandwidth settings, but it won’t work well for modifying latency.

3

actually it might. I’ve noticed that latency goes UP when a link is bottlenecked. So, you could create a bottleneck via bandwidth testing and allow it to run while doing your test.