Advanced Debugging and Root Cause Analysis Questions
Systematic approaches to complex debugging scenarios: intermittent failures, race conditions, environment-dependent issues, infrastructure problems. Using logs, metrics, and instrumentation effectively. Differentiating between automation issues, environment issues, and application defects. Experience with advanced debugging tools and techniques.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
An application gradually consumes more memory and is OOM-killed every two weeks. The team proposes restarting weekly as a workaround. Outline a thorough investigation plan to find the root cause: instrumentation to add, allocation tracking approaches, tests to reproduce the leak faster, and validation steps before deploying a fix to production.
EasyBehavioral
0 practiced
Tell me about a time you diagnosed and resolved a complex production bug. Use the STAR method: describe the Situation, the Task you were responsible for, Actions you took (tools, steps), and the measurable Result. Highlight what you learned and what you changed to prevent recurrence.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
What is fuzz testing (fuzzing)? Describe when you would apply fuzz testing in the development lifecycle, the types of bugs it commonly finds (e.g., memory corruption, panics), and give one concrete plan to integrate fuzzing for a file parser into CI.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Describe how you would run a blameless postmortem after an incident caused by an intermittent bug. What artifacts do you produce (timeline, root cause, contributing factors), what granularity of timeline do you capture, how do you drive corrective actions and owners, and how do you measure remediation success?
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Compare deterministic record/replay tools (e.g., rr) with sampling profilers and instrumented distributed tracing for debugging hard-to-reproduce concurrency bugs. For each approach list strengths, limitations, and scenarios where it is the preferred tool.
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