I'd like to emulate a slow computer. I'm on a modern Core 2 Duo and I'd like to test software that will be run on an old Pentium III 886 MHz with a 5400 RPM hard drive (as old as the PIII). I could limit the CPU launching my virtual machine with cpulimit.

How can I also limit hard disk and system memory speeds to get closer to the real hardware? Is there anything else I can do to achieve this? I know it is very difficult (if not impossible) to do this accurately.

Buying a new faster computer is an option but is not cheap to me because of my country's currency value and high import duties.

Thank you.

Use VMware, create a vm and give it very low resource shares ?

Thanks for responding.

I have to say I'm not a virtualization expert, I'm a network administrator. I'm reading about resource pools on VMware products an it seems it is only available on VMware's enterprise-level ESX Server and that it allows to limit CPU speed but it only allows to define the amount (not the speed) of the memory, and it also doesn't allow to limit disk access speeds.

I'm looking for a solution for the workstation (like an program or a kernel patch) and hopefully free, as I don't plan to do this kind of testing very often.

A virtual disk that can throttle I/O speeds might be part of the solution.

what do you mean by resource shares?

I have successfully run DOS and NW-DOS under qemu with kvm support disabled, but unless you really need a VM, you can simply use dosemu instead

Thanks, but I need to test linux apps.

VMware's ESX/i products allow you to define how many shares of cpu, memory and disk the vm is allowed to use. You can also limit cpu in terms of Mhz which would provide most of the requirements to emulate a slow machine.

cheers

Limiting CPU speed seems to be the easiest thing to do. I believe hard drive access speeds have been significantly increased and are very different from modern values, and this is specially relevant testing an application's load time, which is something that I want to do. I'll add that I currently only have faster and modern 7200 RPM drives on my workstation.