Bandwidth throttling

[Michael ODonnell]

We're trying to simulate the behavior of an app while multiple
instances of it are connected to our server from different
remote client sites that have varying amounts of bandwidth
available.  We're therefore looking for an easy way to throttle
network thoughput on a per-system basis in our test rig, ie.
we want to do the throttling on the clients (a mix of XP and
Linux boxes) so we can demo a mix of low- and high-bandwidth
connections simultaneously.

I guess we could use a managed switch that allows us to
throttle connections (traffic shaping?)  on a per-port basis,
but since we don't have such a device available at the moment
it would be much handier (and less expensive) if we could get
each client to just speak more s-l-o-w-l-y when asked to do so.

It appears that various packages are available which offer this
capability - does anybody have experience with such things?

For example, I see some Debian packages that look interesting:

 shapecfg     - Bandwidth limiter for virtual network interfaces
 shaper       - Traffic shaper init script (cbq.init) for Linux
 shaperd      - A user-mode traffic shaper for tcp-ip networks
 swh-plugins  - Steve Harris's LADSPA plugins
 trickle      - user-space bandwidth shaper
 wondershaper - Easy to use traffic shaping script

...and after a WWW search we found at least one XP package that
looked promising, though it unfortunately made the XP box show
us its BSOD, apparently because the newly installed package
didn't play nice with our 64bit XP kernel...       >-/