WPM percent of optimal values -- Player Payload

I have a ton of questions about WPM myself much like yours. I'm having a hard time understanding what factors make up the load a player is able to handle. How much does that load have to do with the load on the poller is reporting into? How much of the load is caused by the transaction? Do more synthetic users equal more availability?

I found transaction steps that were being "skipped" or perhaps a better way of explaining what was happening would be that a transaction would fail and when I'd go to look at the error screen shot I'd find a picture of the first step. Almost like WPM wasn't waiting for things to finish, or was falling behind. Support told me to add in 30 second wait times which I replied with... If I have to add in a forced wait, doesn't that mean there is potentially a problem with what WPM is doing?

I have gotten a better handle in interpreting the whole WPM player load questions in recent months. First the player load when over 100% is associated with the scheduled transaction waiting to be executed. There are a couple of factors here. The length of time it takes for a transaction to complete. Synthetic user authentication and navigation in the steps defined will be a factor especially when you have a large volume of transactions being processed by a limited number of SEUM user accounts. The 'skipped' steps that you referred to I have seen as a result of the 'packets lost' factor which is services issue. I have seen this lock up transaction and I have had to restart the services to bring this back in line. It isn't done often but I have had to do this. The player load percent we are seeing is getting better as we are balancing the transactions across the environment we have in place. Right now there are a thousand transactions being processed every five to fifteen minutes. I hope this helps.

Per input from SolarWinds Support, we updated the WPM section of the Scalability Engine Guidelines for SolarWinds Orion Products to list factors that impact the amount of transactions each WPM Player can handle. The Player Load Percentage post also includes good information that will be added to the main WPM documentation.