Burp Suite Enterprise Edition system requirements

The system requirements for machines running Burp Suite Enterprise Edition are highly dependent on a variety of factors. These factors include:

• How many concurrent scans you want to run
• The nature and scope of the application being scanned
• The number of machines you want to use. You can either use the bundled deployment option, running all of Burp Suite Enterprise Edition's components on a single machine, or spread your agents across several dedicated agent machines.
• Whether you have enabled Burp Scanner's browser-powered scanning engine
• The number of issues reported
• The number of active users of the Burp Suite Enterprise Edition web UI and APIs

As a result, the system requirements listed in this section are general recommendations that should provide satisfactory performance for most use cases. When provisioning machines, please be aware that you might need to upgrade them later depending on your actual usage.

General requirements

The following requirements apply regardless of your preferred deployment method:

• All machines on which Burp Suite Enterprise Edition components are installed must have a 64-bit architecture.
• The disk location (configured during the installation process) must reside on locally attached storage rather than a network file system. Please note that the free space required is not only for the up-front installation. Disk space is used for storage of ephemeral data during scans and product updates.

Be aware that to get the most out of Burp Suite Enterprise Edition, you will need to assign multiple agents to a machine. In many cases, this will require you to use a dedicated server or server-class virtual machine in order to meet the system requirements.

Swap space (Linux only)

If you want to deploy Burp Suite Enterprise Edition to a Linux-based machine, you should ensure that sufficient storage is allocated as swap space. This can help to improve the stability of scans by providing a fallback for occasions when your scans are using large amounts of memory.

We recommend allocating the same amount of memory as the available RAM, plus an additional 2 GB. For example, for a machine with 32 GB RAM, you should create a 34 GB swap file.

For on-premise installations, it is likely that sufficient swap space will be available by default. However, some cloud services require you to create a suitable swap file manually. For specific instructions on how to do this, please consult the documentation for your cloud service provider.

Bundled deployment

If you decide to use the bundled deployment option, assigning agents to your Enterprise server machine rather than to dedicated external machines, the following system requirements apply.

Note: Browser-powered scanning (BPS) requires a machine with more RAM but achieves greater coverage during scans.

If you also want to use the embedded database, you need to allow space for the data that it accumulates. For more information about how much space is required, please refer to the database and storage space requirements.

External agent machines

Instead of assigning agents to your Enterprise server machine, you can deploy dedicated external machines on which your agents will run when performing scans. For each external agent machine, the following system requirements apply:

Note: Browser-powered scanning (BPS) requires a machine with more RAM but achieves greater coverage during scans.

Database and storage space

The amount of data that might be accumulated by Burp Suite Enterprise Edition depends on the number of scans that you perform and how many issues they find. The following table provides an approximate indication of the quantity of data that is likely to be accumulated:

The following types and versions of external databases have been tested and are fully supported: