DBS-C01 Monitoring and Troubleshooting Practice Question
A company's Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance is experiencing high CPU utilization. The DB instance is a db.r5.large with 200 GB of General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage. The application is performing many complex queries. Which action would BEST reduce CPU utilization without changing the application code?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Scale up the DB instance to db.r5.xlarge
Scaling up the DB instance to db.r5.xlarge provides more CPU capacity, directly reducing CPU utilization. Option A is wrong because read replicas help with read scaling but do not reduce CPU on the writer instance. Option B is wrong because changing storage type to gp3 does not affect CPU. Option D is wrong because the query cache is deprecated in MySQL 8.0 and its impact on CPU is minimal for complex queries.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Create a read replica and route write queries to it
Why it's wrong here
Read replicas are for read traffic, not writes.
- ✗
Modify the storage type to gp3
Why it's wrong here
Storage type does not affect CPU.
- ✓
Scale up the DB instance to db.r5.xlarge
Why this is correct
More CPU cores/vCPUs reduce utilization.
- ✗
Enable the query cache parameter
Why it's wrong here
Query cache may have limited effect and is deprecated in newer MySQL versions.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DBS-C01 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DBS-C01 exam.