Test with (simulated) slow Internet connections
Originally created by Tails on #5526 (Redmine)
In our test suite we need a section for simulating certain types of slow and/or unstable connections to see how Tails can handle them, in particular w.r.t Time syncing and the performance of Tor in general. We have some static timeouts in certain Tails-specific scripts that may have implicit assumptions about connections types, so these script likely could get better values from tests like these.
We need to find a backend for these simulations, and the most suitable
candidate seems to be iproute2
’s tool tc
(pros: it’s already in
Tails, and it can be controlled from within the Tails session). If it
turns out to be the best tool we need to figure out how to set all the
network parameters, e.g. packet loss rate, (possibly variable)
bandwidth, variable delays etc.
We also need to collect reasonable network parameters (and of course identify all parameters that are relevant) for different type of slow/unstable Internet connections so we can establish profiles.
Examples of Internet connection profiles we want to simulate are:
- 56 kbps (or maybe even 33 kbps?) dialup
- GSM tethering
- satellite link