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Tracks/Linux Administration
Advanced 2 minTroubleshooting

How do you troubleshoot high CPU utilization on a Linux production server?

Scenario

You receive a PagerDuty alert at 2 AM. The server is still responding but barely. You have SSH access and standard Linux tooling available.

The interviewer asks

“One of your production web servers is showing 95% CPU utilization and response times have spiked from 50ms to 8 seconds. Users are reporting timeouts. Walk me through exactly how you'd approach this.”

The 30-second answer

Use top/htop to identify the offending process, then ps aux, strace, and perf to understand why. Check for CPU-bound vs I/O-wait distinction. Mitigate first (nice, kill, scale), then root-cause analyze.

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  • The voiced mock interview (2 min)
  • The full senior answer, step by step
  • Animated architecture diagrams
  • The whole conversation, 8 turns
  • Deep dive: how it works, mistakes, risks and trade-offs
  • 2 copy-ready command snippets
  • 3 follow-up questions they'll ask next
  • A self-check of 5 things interviewers listen for
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More Linux Administration interview questions

  • A critical trading host's disk hits 100% mid-session. How do you triage, recover space safely and prevent it?
All Linux Administration questions

Linux commands for this track

  • ls List directory contents
  • cd Change the current working directory
  • pwd Print the current working directory
  • cp Copy files and directories
  • mv Move or rename files and directories
  • rm Remove files and directories
  • mkdir Create directories
  • rmdir Remove empty directories