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Comment by motters | Hacker News Reader

I've used this strategy for a long time, mainly because the target platforms were often low powered PCs or DSPs. At one one company which I worked for not so long ago I was asked on a few occasions whether I wanted a newer PC, and I repeatedly said "no".

I'm not advocating luddism, but if you use a computer which is a few years old and make some dumb mistakes then the performance penalty is big and immediately obvious at the development stage, whereas on the latest hardware with multiple CPU cores it might not be so obvious and then turns into a crisis during deployment.

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Also watch out for that SSD sitting in your machine making file access "free". :)

Is there a tool to slow down disk access?

I'm especially worried about UI thread getting blocked on file access to sleeping HDD or unreliable network drive (i.e. I don't want my applications to be as beachball-death-prone as Finder and iTunes)

Can you move IO onto another thread, or use asynchronous/non-blocking methods? Blocking IO should never be done on your UI thread.

That's what I'd like to do, but there are non-obvious cases that I could have missed, e.g. seemingly innocent system calls, observers/event callbacks.

Also, when you make I/O truly async, you need to ensure UI behaves sanely while slow I/O happens in the background.

Use a USB stick?

In this same thinking there are still some USB 1.1 hubs out there too. This should give you a VERY slow drive for a decent price. As an example:

http://www.amazon.com/Ho97958-Usb-1-1-Slim-4-Port/dp/B00030N...

OS is too good at caching reads, so tests are not repeatable.

Maybe use an actual network filesystem (NFS/Samba/whatever), and then throttle/shape the network traffic however you like (lots of suggestions upthread).

You could probably do it over a loopback device on the same machine if you don't have a network handy.

This has done wonders to show me just how buggy iTunes is, simply by trying to store all of my media on a remote machine.

Hm, I should add these mp3s to my library. Drag, drop, make coffee, hit the bathroom, chat with the QA guy, come back, read some HN comments, hey, it's done.

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