DBS-C01 Management and Operations Practice Question
A database administrator is troubleshooting a sudden increase in read latency on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. The instance has 200 GB of General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage with 600 provisioned IOPS. The administrator notices that the average queue depth is consistently above 4. Which action is the MOST effective way to reduce read latency?
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
✓
Migrate to an io1 volume with 3000 provisioned IOPS.
Migrating to an io1 volume with 3000 provisioned IOPS directly increases the available IOPS, addressing the high queue depth and reducing read latency. Option A is incorrect because Multi-AZ does not allow read traffic to the standby; the standby is only used for failover. Option B is incorrect because increasing the instance size may not resolve the I/O bottleneck if the issue is insufficient IOPS. Option D is incorrect because increasing the allocated storage for gp2 increases baseline IOPS (3 IOPS per GB), but the option specifies not changing IOPS, so it would not help; even if it did, 500 GB would provide 1500 IOPS, which may still not be sufficient.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ deployment to offload reads to the standby.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ does not offload reads; the standby is not accessible for reads.
- ✗
Change the instance type to a larger size with more vCPUs.
Why it's wrong here
Read latency is storage-bound, not compute-bound.
- ✓
Migrate to an io1 volume with 3000 provisioned IOPS.
Why this is correct
Increasing IOPS addresses the queue depth and reduces latency.
- ✗
Increase the allocated storage to 500 GB without changing IOPS.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing gp2 storage increases baseline IOPS, but not as effectively as io1.
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