What are some tools to test low latency manually? And does the industry create test cases around low latency(performance testing)?

Question

The company I am working for has a mobile app that is facing issues for a certain client that says the app crashes. We incorporated Crashlytics to the app and found that the crashing is caused by low-latency network. Yet, during our testing we have never had such crashes.

Now, we are thinking about adopting the performance testing of our applications and this involves low-latency tests. Would love to know the methods that are being used out there to simulate low-latency environment. Also, do we require test cases to be written for performance testing? If yes, then what is the content of such test cases.

Answer 1

I don't know what tools you are using but I see you have manual-testing tagged. There are a few very easy to use manual testing tools (DevTools & Lighthouse) available in your browser already that you can use for your initial exploratory testing and then build off of it.

I find that DevTools has some great performance tools built in. You can imitate a mobile device with a poor network connection very easily, with little to no knowledge//experience of performance testing.

Here are some great sites to get started:

1. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/devtools-guide-chromium/evaluate-performance/
2. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/devtools-guide-chromium/speed/get-started
3. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-chrome-dev-tools-to-find-performance-bottlenecks
4. https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/

Answer 2

As a software testing services company services, in order to do a full fledged Performance testing of an application with detailed report, you can chose to use Jmeter Tool (Open source) that also has the capability to generate HTML Reports by which you can distinguish the various payloads in application.

For manual testing, we have option in Browser Devtools to throttle the network capacity as well. This might help to do a initial latency tests for application.