Throttle CPU and resources available to Chrome

Question

I am trying to emulate the feel of an application on lower spec systems, running on Chrome. Is it possible throttle the CPU and put limitations on resources?

Tongs

Answer 1

Chrome has introduced CPU throttling now.

Goto DevTools -> Performance and click ⚙️ icon at the top right side of the Performance tab. You will see a CPU Throttling dropdown.

Kosel

It's gone in the latest canary. – Rawley

Wtf, why Google decided to remove it?! – Shala

You can still find it in the "Performance" tab under the cog icon. – Steerage

Answer 2

As of Chrome 112.0.5615.121, CPU throttling is available under the 'Performance Insights' tab.

DevTools > Performance Insights > Settings (gear icon) > CPU

Select something in CPU throttling and click "Measure page load"

Zootoxin

There are only two choices for CPU throttling: 4x slowdown and 6x slowdown. My machine is so fast that even a 6x slowdown is only causing a < 1s delay loading the page, whereas I have reports on slow machines of it taking longer than this. How can I get better control of exactly how much throttling is done so I can slow it down further? – Jodyjoe

@Jodyjoe I don't think there are many options for fine grained CPU throttling. You might try combining 6x slowdown with the Network throttling, advanced pain instrumentation, and maybe a low hardware concurrency. But ultimately you'll want to test on slower hardware for a real world example. – Zootoxin

Answer 3

That depends on your platform and available tools at your disposal. Usually, you are able to set CPU clock in your BIOS settings. There may also be CPU clock management software tools that you could use within your OS for more dynamic control.

You can also emulate network data throttling in Chrome's Dev Tools. If you enable device emulation mode, the network throttling option becomes available.

Daven