It is possible to connect the controller to agents through a limited bandwidth VPN connection, however this is not recommended. It is better to have the controller in the same environment as the agents and if necessary use remote desktop to start the test from outside via VPN. If a remote controller is the only approach available then agents will need to be set up as WAN agents rather than LAN and the required ports will need to be open in any firewall or anti-virus. The following ports are required to be open: TCP ports: 19200, 19201 (when using secure connections), and 19202, 19203. See SilkPerformer"s Advanced Concepts documentation - "Remote Agent Connection" section. Traffic between the controller and agents will need to be minimized. See some suggestions below for minimizing the traffic between the agents and controller machines: 1) Ensure that only agent machines are configured in the agent pool and not localhost or the controller machine. 2) Optimize the SilkPerformer Monitor to reduce Controller-Agent communications * In the monitor window of SilkPerformer set the Data collection interval of the monitor to "Manually". The default setting for this is 1 sec. To check the status during the loadtest, click the Refresh Now button. * Deselect the button "Display all Errors of all Users" in the Toolbar of the monitor window. By default this is selected. * Do not check "Show output of WebUser..." in the context menu of the virtual user view of the monitor window during. By default this is not checked. 3) Ensure that any files used are stored and referenced locally on agents so they do not need to be copied. 4) Do not monitor the SilkPerformer Controller data source (Active users, Transaction Rate, Hits/s etc). By default these are monitored. To stop monitoring you can choose Remove Data Source from the context menu in Performance Explorer.
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