PC Requirements

One of the things not mentioned has to do with a couple of NameMapping settings.

Under Tools | Options | Engines, there are two things that I would recommend turning off.

First, Uncheck "Search for visible objects first".  If you have code that checks for existence or other similar checks against objects that might not have the Visible property set to true, this can slow down playback.  Unchecking this has the search algorithms of NameMapping search all available objects which means that it will find such "invisible" objects faster, improving performance.  When we unchecked this, we saw a remarkable increase in performance on our systems.

Secondly, and this won't have such an immediate effect, uncheck the option "Use extended find when possible".  Having that option checked means that every time you map something in TestComplete, it will automatically collapse your components and use the "Extended Find" feature.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing but using Extended Find TOO much can slow down performance as, for each component that has that flag checked, the NameMapping algorithms execute a search of child objects to find the desired one which does slow down performance.  I uncheck that option and then only use "Extended Find" where necessary rather than letting TestComplete choose for me.

Now, if you had that second option checked and then uncheck it, as mentioned, this won't have an immediate effect.  In order to improve performance where Extended Find might be the cause, you will need to find all mapped components that have that flag checked and add additional "parent" components into your mapping tree in order to be able to turn that flag off.  This does take some time and elbow grease, however, once you do it, you will see improved performance.