Code Room
On-callHardoc-g157
Subject Redelivery stormLevel Senior–Staff~40 minCommon in Reliability & on-call interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

RabbitMQ cluster, quorum queue `image-resize`. At 11:30 the `redelivered` message rate on the queue spikes to ~95% of all deliveries, the queue's `ready` count oscillates between 40k and 80k, and consumer `unacked` counts on each of the 8 workers sit pinned at their `prefetch` limit (50). Throughput (acks/sec) has fallen ~70%. No deploy. Recent context: the upstream object store the resize workers read from started returning intermittent 5s timeouts about 15 minutes before the alert; the broker's per-message `delivery-attempts`/x-death header counts are climbing. How do you triage and mitigate this redelivery storm?

What a strong answer looks like

Stop the bleeding first (mitigate), then form hypotheses from real signals. Separate root cause from symptom, communicate status as you go, and close with what prevents a repeat.

Diagram & narrate the incident
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.