Silk Performer offers two mechanisms for recording TCP/IP based protocol traffic.
Socksifying such an application is the most commonly accepted approach. There are however some scenarios in which using a TCP proxy recorder
is the better solution:
- Using the TCP proxy mechanism,
Silk Performer doesn't have to run on the same machine as the client application. This works if for example both client and server are Unix
applications. Just configure them in such a way that they connect to each other using the
Silk Performer proxy residing on a Windows box.
- Sometimes, there are numerous client application processes all connected to the same server. In such instances it may be quicker
to set up a TCP proxy than to it is to search NT's task manager for all processes that are generating traffic.
- Configuration is easy if you only need to record on one or a small number of TCP ports.