Bandwidth profiling Flex projects and more with Charles

Sasha Dzeletovic, Wednesday, November 19, 2008 @ 11:25 pm

Adobe Flash comes with a very useful feature for bandwidth profiling. It allows you to see how will your site/app act under certain network conditions.

Flex Builder unfortunately does not have that option so we have to look somewhere else for a solution for testing.

While there are many applications that simulate various network conditions, Charles stud up as the most practical for Flex developers, in my opinion.

First thing that I liked about Charles is the ease of configuration. And you can configure a few things that are precious when developing a Flex app.

1. Charles supports No Caching per location. This means that you can block caching for your app that you are testing while keeping it on for other internet content that you as a Flex developer are always searching for reference. When does this comes in handy? Anytime your is loading dynamic content and especially for multimedia projects.

2. Charles supports Throttling. Works the same as Flash bandwidth profiler but also enables you to throttle specific locations. So you can set your network bandwidth to a desired speed and see if your user experience holds up.

3. As Charles shows you HTTP headers and AMF0 & AMF3 content being sent back and forward, it is extremely useful for checking data integrity. Basically, it shows you content of any data being passed through the network that has to do with your application and more. I am a great fan of AMF3 and this feature is a life saver when you are trying to debug AMF3 related issues.

Having all these wonderful features, it is also easy to use and takes about a minute to install and start using.

There is also a fully featured free version that is limited only by you being able to use it 30 min at a time. Not that it is too much of a trouble, but for convinience of developing I recomend getting the licence that is moderately priced.

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