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On-callHard
Question
A Redis instance (used as a cache+session store) becomes briefly unresponsive — commands stall for several seconds — every hour on the hour, and clients see timeouts and a thundering retry storm. The instance holds ~12GB of data on a 16GB host with no maxmemory set and swap enabled. The stalls line up exactly with the scheduled RDB save (`save 3600 ...`) at the top of each hour: during the save you see memory usage briefly spike toward the host limit, swap si/so activity, and high iowait. Triage and mitigate.
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.
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