Stream consumer OOMKilled on restart
A stream-processing consumer (Kafka → transform → write to a slow downstream warehouse) starts growing RSS and eventually gets OOMKilled, then on restart immediately reprocesses a backlog and OOMs again — a crash loop. Dashboards show consumer lag climbing for hours, an in-memory work queue between the fetch stage and the write stage growing without bound, and downstream warehouse write latency up 5x after the warehouse began a maintenance/compaction window. Consumer fetch rate is unchanged. Triage and fix.
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.
0:00 of about 40 min
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.