System Requirements

The following sections describe the system requirements for installing and running Silk Performer.

To run the Silk Performer agent software, or both controller and agent software, and to use the full potential of Silk Performer to run large-scale load tests, your system must meet the following minimum requirements:

Hardware Requirements

System Area	Requirement
Processor	Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent CPU
RAM	4 GB
Hard disk space	2.2 GB for controller software installation 1 GB for agent-only installation Depending on the size of your load tests, make sure you have enough space on your hard disk for result files.
Network	Network connectivity to the system under test and to all Silk Performer agent computers.

Operating System Requirements

Both the Silk Performer controller and the Silk Performer agent can be installed on any Windows client or server operating system of version 6.1 or newer. This means Silk Performer requires Microsoft Windows 7 or newer, or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 or newer.
Installing the network emulation driver is currently not supported for Microsoft Windows 10 and Microsoft Windows Server 2016.

Software Requirements

To install and run Silk Performer, your system requires a minimum set of software components.

The required components vary based on installation type. For example, to run Silk Performer Java Explorer, your system must be equipped with the appropriate Java Development Kit. Download components from the respective websites.

Internet Explorer 10, 11 for browser-driven load testing.
PDF viewer to view documentation .
Citrix Receiver for Microsoft Windows 3.x, 4.x (except 4.4, 4.10 and newer versions) to test Citrix applications. Citrix Receiver 4.4 as well as 4.10 and newer do not work due to an issue in these Citrix versions.
Java Runtime Environment (JRE): Both 32- and 64-bit versions are required on 64-bit operating systems.
Java Development Kit 7, 8 (32-bit) to test Java applications with Java Explorer.
Visual Studio 2013, 2015, or 2017 for Visual Studio extension. To use Visual Studio 2012, Visual Studio 2013 needs to be installed as well.

Working with Silk Performer on a multi-user system

Silk Performer can be installed on a machine with terminal services enabled for multi-user access. In general, it is not recommended to work in multiple sessions simultaneously. If you want to do so nevertheless, keep the following in mind:

Recording: The Silk Performer Recorder uses a system-wide hooking mechanism. If one user starts the Recorder, the traffic of all other users might be recorded as well.
Workbench: Multiple users can work on different projects simultaneously. Working on the same project is not recommended. The project will be opened in read-only mode for the second and all further users.
Executing tests: Multiple users can execute tests simultaneously from one machine. However, multiple simultaneously running tests will influence each other as they share the same resources (CPU, memory, network bandwidth).
Monitoring tests: Performance Explorer does not differentiate between test metrics of multiple running tests. Therefore, real-time values of the wrong test might be displayed.