InterviewStack.io LogoInterviewStack.io

Linux Process and Service Management Questions

Technical topic covering operating system process and service management on Linux. Includes process states and hierarchies, signals and graceful termination, investigating processes with ps and top, interpreting the proc filesystem, managing daemons and services with systemctl and service commands, startup behavior, resource troubleshooting with top and free, log inspection in var log, and basic service restart and health check strategies. Candidates should be able to diagnose runaway processes and explain safe remediation steps.

HardTechnical
16 practiced
Design a systemd-based approach to rotate and retain high-volume logs safely for a service that produces many GBs per hour. Compare using journald retention controls (SystemMaxUse, SystemKeepFree) vs classic logrotate, and describe how you would avoid losing recent logs during rotation and minimize service disruption.
EasyTechnical
22 practiced
Explain the difference between a zombie process and an orphan process. How do you detect zombies on a system and what are safe remediation steps an SRE can take to remove or prevent zombie accumulation without risking data corruption?
HardTechnical
24 practiced
Implement (or outline in pseudocode) a Python script that watches processes and moves any process exceeding a configurable swap usage threshold into a low-priority cgroup to limit its resource impact. Address concurrency, PID reuse, and how you would verify operations did not destabilize critical services. Describe how you would deploy this safely.
MediumTechnical
17 practiced
Explain how to restrict a service's CPU and memory using cgroups (preferably cgroup v2 or systemd unit settings). Provide example systemd unit directives or commands showing how to limit memory to 2G and CPU to 20% of a single CPU, and explain how to inspect the applied cgroup settings on disk.
MediumTechnical
19 practiced
Write a short incident runbook for handling a long-running process that is consuming all memory and threatening to trigger the OOM killer on a production host. Include pre-incident checks, safe remediation steps (including graceful termination attempts), communication steps, and how to update SLOs or error budgets after the incident.

Unlock Full Question Bank

Get access to hundreds of Linux Process and Service Management interview questions and detailed answers.

Sign in to Continue

Join thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.