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System Resource & I/O Optimization Questions

Tuning how a system uses CPU, memory, disk, and network at the OS and I/O layer. Covers I/O throughput and blocking, buffering and batching, filesystem and kernel-level performance settings, and resource contention between processes. Includes OS-level performance tuning and diagnosing resource saturation on the host.

HardSystem Design
49 practiced
Hard: You need to implement a safety net in systemd for services that may leak memory over time: an automatic, staged restart strategy that restarts a service before it reaches critical memory usage while preserving in-flight requests where possible. Describe unit settings, helper scripts, and how you'd detect approaching thresholds safely.
MediumTechnical
28 practiced
Medium: A service under systemd sometimes fails to bind to a TCP port on startup with 'Address already in use' only when restarted quickly. How would you change the unit file and application to reduce the likelihood of this race? Explain TIME_WAIT implications and a system-level mitigation.
EasyTechnical
37 practiced
Explain what the page cache is and how the Linux kernel uses it. Describe how you would tell if a workload is benefiting from page cache and one way to reduce memory pressure caused by page cache.
HardTechnical
26 practiced
Hard: You find a process consuming large amounts of file descriptors and causing EMFILE errors globally. Propose a plan to debug where descriptors are coming from, short-term mitigations to restore service, and long-term design changes to prevent descriptor leaks. Include commands to gather evidence.
MediumTechnical
37 practiced
Write a short Python script that parses the output of peticularly formatted 'vmstat 1 5' (5 samples) from stdin and prints the maximum 'si' and 'so' columns observed and the timestamp of that sample. Explain how you would run it safely on a production server without interfering with performance.

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