System Resource Management and Monitoring Questions

Monitor and manage operating system and hardware level resources to ensure application performance and stability. Topics include central processing unit utilization and context switching, system load trends, memory usage including heap and stack behavior, paging and swapping effects, disk input output operations and free space, and network bandwidth utilization and packet loss. Know diagnostic tools and commands for observing these signals, recognize patterns of resource contention and exhaustion such as out of memory and high input output wait, and understand mitigation techniques including tuning, resource limits, throttling, caching, capacity planning, and vertical or horizontal scaling.

MediumTechnical

73 practiced

Explain context switching: the difference between voluntary and involuntary context switches, how excessive context switching affects latency, which metrics show context-switch rates (e.g., vmstat cs, /proc/stat), and strategies to reduce excessive context switching at kernel and application levels.

MediumTechnical

51 practiced

Describe how to measure paging activity on Linux using vmstat, /proc/vmstat and perf. Explain which thresholds indicate harmful paging behavior versus normal cache eviction, and suggest immediate mitigations and monitoring checks to detect when paging becomes pathological.

MediumTechnical

40 practiced

Compare vertical scaling and horizontal scaling as mitigations for memory pressure or CPU saturation. Discuss operational tradeoffs, cost implications, when to prefer each approach, and how to refactor applications to better enable horizontal scaling (e.g., statelessness, sharding).

MediumTechnical

40 practiced

An autoscaling group currently scales only on CPU utilization but oscillates and causes thrashing. Design an autoscaling policy for a web service that uses multiple signals (CPU, request latency, error-rate), step-scaling, cooldowns, and optional predictive scaling to reduce oscillation while meeting SLOs. Explain metrics and thresholds you'd use.

HardTechnical

52 practiced

Design an agent that collects per-process network byte counters on Linux with minimal overhead. Compare approaches: scraping /proc/net/dev and per-process /proc/<pid>/net devs, using netlink sockets, or using eBPF to attribute packets to processes. Discuss accuracy, overhead, kernel support, and scalability concerns.

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