DBS-C01 Monitoring and Troubleshooting Practice Question
A developer reports that an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster's memory usage is consistently above 90%. The application uses Redis for caching and session storage. Which configuration change would MOST effectively reduce memory pressure?
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
✓
Enable eviction with volatile-LRU policy
Enabling eviction with the volatile-LRU policy automatically removes the least recently used keys that have a TTL set, freeing memory without manual intervention. Option B (scaling up) reduces memory pressure but at higher cost; it is not the most effective change since eviction addresses the root cause by discarding stale data. Option C (AOF persistence) writes data to disk, not freeing memory; it can actually increase memory usage during writes. Option D (disabling replication) may free some memory used for replica buffers but does not address the high memory utilization caused by cached data, and it impacts availability.
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 eviction with volatile-LRU policy
Why this is correct
Correct. The volatile-LRU eviction policy removes keys with TTLs (like session data) that are least recently used, effectively freeing memory while preserving critical cached data without TTLs.
- ✗
Scale up to a larger node type
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. Scaling up increases available memory but does not reduce the memory pressure from existing data; it also incurs additional cost and does not solve the underlying issue of excessive cached data.
- ✗
Enable AOF persistence to free memory
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. AOF persistence writes Redis commands to a log for durability, but does not free memory; it can actually increase memory usage due to background save processes.
- ✗
Disable replication to reduce memory overhead
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. Disabling replication removes replica nodes but does not significantly reduce memory usage on the primary node; the primary's memory is still consumed by cached data, and replication is important for high availability.
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JA
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.