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Comment by leon_ | Hacker News Reader

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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