WPM using a high amount of CPU

Hello all,

Not sure if this is an issue or if it is normal. I think it is an issue though.

The process Solarwinds.SEUM.Agent.Worker has decided that on occasion it is going to use 35% of the CPU (usually split into 2 separate processes with the same name each using between 15 to 20%). I only have 4 transactions each with 1 or 2 steps where they only go to the page and do not have any interaction. I've opened a ticket but haven't received any information other than run the configuration wizard and restart the services. Which we have done and these processes continue to do this.

I loaded up process explorer and process monitor and at the time I see Solarwinds.SEUM.Agent.Worker ramping up from 1% usage to the 15% usage I see quite a few Operations RegQueryValue, and RegOpenKey with the Result being NAME NOT FOUND or REPARSE.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with this kind of thing but I figure posting here might be worth a shot.

Any insight or thoughts would be appreciated, thank you.

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

muckman

Unfortunately, This behavior is normal. WPM is very CPU intensive and we've had to build a server farm for our WPM players.

We found the WPM player agent was running multiple transactions at the same time in parallel. This would result in the periods of the CPU being overloaded in a cyclic fashion. Any time the CPU would max the playback response times would be affected of course. In an effort to force WPM players to run the transactions serially. I reduced the number of worker processes to a value that matches the number of CPU cores and set max playbacks per worker to 1. This forced all playbacks to run 1 at a time per worker and settled the CPU activity.

Edit: C:\Program Files (x86)\SolarWinds\Orion\SEUM\Player\SolarWinds.SEUM.Agent.Service.exe.config

The two properties you want to modify are:

numWorkerProcesses

maxPlaybacksPerWorker

Save and restart the WPM services on that player.

All comments

stevenwhunt

I'd have to look in my environment, but I don't think it would be terribly uncommon for CPU to spike when playback is happening. The amount of information being processed during that period could have an impact.

jeilers

Which it probably has something to do with it. What makes me think it isn't running properly is that after a reboot it will not spike to higher than 2 to 3% for a long while(multiple playthroughs). We can also see that the overall CPU usage has gone up steadily for a couple of months now. Then not to mention the fact that it is just 4 transactions and all they do is hit the front page of 4 separate sites without taking any other steps than that.

jeilers

Decided to call today to support rather than email back and forth on the ticket. On the phone they showed me where to get hotfixes and explain a few other things that helped my understanding. Not able to tell if they've been applied in the past. Have a window tonight where it's possible to apply them. Will report back with information to see if this helps.

jeilers

Just to update this as well. The hotfixes didn't fix the issue. We switched to SAM Monitors since we were not doing anything fancy with it. Asked for the ticket to be escalated because it has been over a month at this point and we aren't even using our licenses for wpm due to the stability issues it is causing to our one and only polling engine.

stevenwhunt

Can you provide me with your case number?

muckman

Unfortunately, This behavior is normal. WPM is very CPU intensive and we've had to build a server farm for our WPM players.

Edit: C:\Program Files (x86)\SolarWinds\Orion\SEUM\Player\SolarWinds.SEUM.Agent.Service.exe.config

The two properties you want to modify are:

numWorkerProcesses

maxPlaybacksPerWorker

Save and restart the WPM services on that player.

jeilers

Thanks for the tips. I should have updated this. It appears the server farm for the players or just a separate machine for the player is what should be done. Was advised by support to run the player on a separate machine than the rest of my solarwinds products.