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.

HardTechnical

47 practiced

A Java microservice is occasionally OOM-killed during GC compaction. Propose immediate JVM and container-level mitigations (Xmx, Xms, GC logging, -XX:+ExitOnOutOfMemoryError, container memory limits), plus long-term fixes (heap tuning, memory profiling, avoiding large pause-causing alloc patterns). Also outline monitoring signals that would detect regressions.

EasyTechnical

43 practiced

Explain paging and swapping on Linux. Describe the performance impacts of heavy paging/swapping and how to detect it using commands like free, vmstat, and sar -W. Explain vm.swappiness and when tuning it may improve or worsen latency.

HardTechnical

48 practiced

Explain CPU 'steal' time observed on VMs. What does it indicate about hypervisor scheduling behavior, how does it manifest to tenant workloads, and what steps can you take as an SRE to detect and mitigate steal across cloud hosts?

HardTechnical

53 practiced

Explain NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architecture and how it impacts multi-socket server performance. Describe detection methods for NUMA imbalance (numastat, /proc/zoneinfo, perf), how to bind processes and memory with numactl, and when to use hugepages or CPU pinning to improve locality.

EasyTechnical

40 practiced

Describe differences between heap and stack memory for a process. Explain typical causes of heap exhaustion versus stack overflow, how language runtimes (e.g., JVM, Go) manage heap growth, and which tools/commands you'd use to inspect process memory (pmap, /proc/<pid>/smaps, jmap, pprof, heap dumps).

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