Artificial "Global" Test Agents?

[nitucker]

Hmm. Unfortunately, I won't be able to use Amazon's service in my company due to cost and other reasons.

I was hoping to simulate the conditions programmatically. Is there any possibility for that? What are the driving factors for performance characteristic impacts across continents? Just the latency of reaching the server? We're going to use a CDN for some content, but not all, so I expect minor impact to non-North American users when pulling the handful (~10) of site images we're hosting locally.

For example, if I test Amazon.com from Dulles, VA on IE7 and from Delhi, India on IE7, it's 2-3 times longer on most metrics.

Thoughts?

Thanks!