Code Room
On-callHardoc-g445
Subject SaturationLevel Senior–Staff~40 minCommon in Networking & APIs interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

A streaming-upload service (Go) that proxies large client uploads to object storage starts showing badly inflated p99 latency on its small, fast control-plane API endpoints — the lightweight `/status` and `/auth` calls that share the same hosts. The big upload streams are healthy and throughput is high; it's the tiny requests that are now slow, with multi-second delays. There was no traffic spike. A 'performance' change last sprint cranked the socket send buffers way up (`SO_SNDBUF`) and increased an internal write-queue size to 'smooth out' uploads. NIC utilization is moderate; CPU and memory are fine. How do you 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.

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