If you are planning to deploy a new application or upgrade a current product, then it's worth considering the side-effects if performance is a problem. When brands are damaged, revenue - along with customer loyalty - can be lost. Security issues may result in legal problems. The problems are shared by developers and CIOs alike.
Monitoring response times for each transaction during a set period of time enables confidence in real time behaviour and identify potential risks. Load testing will highlight problems in application software and help prevent bottlenecks.
Silk Performer® provides an enterprise-class tool for automated software application performance and load testing. It delivers realistic, dependable performance tests across the latest technologies and simulate loads across multiple mobile devices, set-ups and network speeds.
The Silk Performer® Cloudburst™ feature enables users to simulate users in the cloud. It dramatically reduces costs by removing the need for load testing hardware and setup - and it reduces complexity in the performance testing process.
Different applications require different types of user simulation. Silk Performer therefore offers three different levels of support for target application environments: Web, Standard & Premium. Each level up can handle more complexity and is available in multiple bundle sizes, both in node-locked and concurrent use license models.
Silk Perfomer has been built with integration into your environment and tool infrastructure in mind. There are a large number of out of the box integrations available to ensure you get the most out of your complete investment in technology to ensure that you can build better software, faster. Not only does it work well with other products in the Silk Portfolio, it also enhances 3rd party products.
Silk Performer integrates with Silk Central to provide:
Silk Performer can re-use scripts of Borland’s functional testing tool Silk Test to load-test applications on the GUI level – i.e. Fat client or GUI level load-testing.
Silk Performer integrates with StarTeam for source code control. Manage and share your performance test assets in a common repository directly from within the Silk Performer Workbench.
Fully integrated, click-through drill-down delivers a multi-tier performance breakdown to identify the root cause of performance bottlenecks down to the line of code for both Java and .NET applications.
Developers can write and run Silk Performer tests scripts written in Java or .NET entirely within their native programming environment. Directly import unit test scripts for testing server-side Java and .NET components under concurrent access, simulating realistic server conditions.
Directly import unit test scripts for testing server-side Java and .NET components under concurrent access, simulating realistic server conditions.
BMC TM ART (powered by Silk Performer) monitors the end-user experience and service-level fulfilment of your live application 24x7x365:
Performance monitoring
Asset reuse and closed-loop testing
Silk Performer CloudBurst delivers performance testing across all the latest technologies, including mobile. It enables end-to-end testing and delivers complete control of your teams. Full reports keep users in control of the process - and the cost-effectiveness in control of company budgets.
New for this release: Borland Credits - Only pay for what you use
Borland include the virtual machines, storage and infrastructure. Users also get:
Why you need performance testing
Get a taste of Silk Performer
Borland Credits are a virtual currency that can be used to purchase CloudBurst testing services, available from the Silk Performer Cloud Portal or your sales representative.
The billing process follows a pre-paid model: You first purchase Borland Credits and then decide how and when you want to use them.
Borland Credits must be purchased in advance.
Borland Credits can be used for Virtual User license fees and for Cloud infrastructure (load-test agents) rental fees.
These are calculated based on the maximum number of concurrently active Virtual Users in a 24-hour testing period. The fee per active virtual user is dependent on the application type under test:
Virtual user cost protection: When your application doesn’t scale to meet the loads you anticipated, Borland virtual user price protection means you only pay for what you have used.
The infrastructure rental fee is comprised of a passive and an active fee. The passive fee is charged for the time an agent runs, the active fee is only charged for the time the running agent is used to execute a load test. During the execution of a load test, both the passive and the active fee are charged.
Please contact supportline or your sales representative if you need more instances for your load-test.
Silk Performer fully supports performance testing for mobile Web applications and native apps, with profiles for all popular mobile devices and application types.
Smaller screen sizes and different input methods mean that many Web applications look different on a mobile device. Application performance testing of mobile versions of a web page have to be treated as separate applications,even though they might share some components on the back-end.
Silk Performer can record and simulate a variety of mobile browsers on Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry.
For unrivalled accuracy directly record traffic from a smartphone or tablet over the air via the Silk Performer proxy.
If you don’t have access to specific mobile devices you can use a device emulator to record browser-based or native applications.
Accurately simulate mobile network connections with pre-defined profiles for phone standards like GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA, HSPA+, and LTE.
Simulate massive traffic of mobile devices from different parts of the world and validate the impact these might have on your new or existing applications.
If you want to read more about our cloud based testing solution, see details in the 'Cloudburst' section.
Discover why Telefónica O2 Business Solutions wants to adopt Silk Performer to become a part of the default process for each solution it delivers.
For our customers, we provide complete services in the implementation of applications in their IT environments, and stress tests are one of the important elements. Silk Performer is the leading technology for stress testing, and thanks to a favorable licensing policy was our preferred choice.
— Jiří Červený, Monitoring and Testing Manager, Telefónica O2 Business Solutions
Download Case StudyThe COLIBRI application, which calculates and makes payment of unemployment benefits, has 50,000 users across Germany. Customer surveys universally return high levels of customer satisfaction in terms of functionality, reliability and dependability. Our use of Silk Test and Silk Performer makes a strong contribution to this result and I am very happy with our decision to use such mature and powerful tools.
— Doctor Christian Brandes Software Test Architect, Bundesagentur für Arbeit
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iPass uses Micro Focus Silk Test to execute all of its client OS and Service Portal testing across all languages and OS platforms. But customer service, billing and management portals - transactional server systems - all require an additional level of 'load' testing, difficult to achieve with humans or Silk Test alone. iPass incorporates Micro Focus Silk Performer to supplement the already extensive functional automation regimen Silk Test provides. Silk Performer ensures a level of robustness of our server systems - under load - that could simply not be achieved otherwise.
— Blair Bullock, Director of Technology Integration, iPass Inc
Download Case StudyOur vending devices generally have system peaks around lunch and dinner times. Since we strive for fast card authorization – no more than two to three seconds – Silk Performer helps us quickly identify and resolve bottlenecks. More importantly, we can isolate and fix problems more easily than before.
— Art Royce, Director of QA, USA Technologies
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Find out what’s new in Silk Performer 10.0, offering leading web, enterprise and mobile testing for your mission-critical applications.
DownloadSilk Performer is the most scalable and easiest to use web and enterprise load testing solution.
DownloadSilk Performer CloudBurst quickly simulates any size peak-loads from multiple geographies without having to invest in load testing hardware and setup.
DownloadSilk Performer is the most scalable, easiest to use load and stress testing solution for optimizing the performance of business applications such as Citrix.
DownloadSilk Performer is the most scalable, easiest to use load and stress testing solution for optimizing the performance of business applications such as Remedy ARS.
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Load testing is vital to address challenges such as: When in the software development process to load test, and how to achieve optimal performance by proper load testing. It examines various implementation strategies and the real benefits that load testing returns. It also identifies the proper strategy for realizing the full benefits of load testing, including how to diagnose issues in your applications and using the power of the cloud.
End-to-end load tests must ensure that applications are 'battle ready' and can withstand massive, global use. Silk Performer CloudBurst quickly simulates any size peak-loads from multiple geographies without having to invest in load testing hardware and setup. Discover the best practices for cloud-based peak load testing.