Testing perceived performance

Question

I recently got a shiny new development workstation. The only disadvantage of this is that the desktop apps I'm developing now run very, very fast, and so I fear that parts of the code that would be annoyingly slow on end users' machines will go unnoticed during my testing.

Is there a good way to slow down an application for testing? I've tried searching around, but all of the results I've been able to find seem pretty fiddly to set up (e.g., manually setting up a high-priority CPU-bound task on the same CPU core as the target app, or running a background process that rapidly interrupts and resumes the target app), and I don't know if the end result is actually a good representation of running on a slower computer (with its slower CPU, slower RAM, slower disk I/O...).

I don't think that this is a job for a profiler; I'm interested in the user's perception of end-to-end performance rather than in where the time goes for particular operations.

Answer 1

setup a virtual machine, give in as little ram as needed and also you can have it use 1,2 or more CPUs. I like VirtualBox myself install your app and test with different RAM configs

Answer 2

Personally, I'd get an old used crappy computer that is typical of what the users have and test on that. It should be cheap and you will see pretty fast how bad things are.