Question 420 of 1,663
DBS-C01 Management and Operations Practice Question
An e-commerce company uses Amazon ElastiCache for Redis as a session store for its web application. The application experiences occasional latency spikes during flash sales. The operations team notices that the Redis cluster's CPU utilization reaches 90% during these events. The current cluster is a single shard with a cache.r5.large node. The team wants to reduce CPU utilization and improve performance. What should the database administrator do?
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
✓
Add read replicas to offload read traffic from the primary node.
Adding read replicas to an ElastiCache for Redis cluster allows read traffic to be offloaded from the primary node, reducing its CPU utilization. During flash sales, the high read load from session retrieval causes the primary's CPU to spike. Read replicas handle read queries, lowering the primary's CPU usage. Option B is incorrect because increasing replicas for data durability (e.g., for failover) does not directly reduce CPU load; replicas also serve reads but the primary still handles writes. Option C is incorrect because disabling AOF persistence reduces write overhead only marginally; the main CPU load during flash sales is from read traffic, not persistence. Option D is incorrect because enabling encryption at rest adds CPU overhead for encryption operations, which would increase CPU utilization, not reduce it.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Add read replicas to offload read traffic from the primary node.
Why this is correct
Read replicas handle read requests, reducing CPU usage on the primary.
- ✗
Increase the number of replicas for data durability.
Why it's wrong here
Replicas improve read scalability but adding more replicas does not directly reduce CPU on the primary; however, distributing reads helps. The correct answer is to add read replicas to offload reads.
- ✗
Disable AOF persistence to reduce write overhead.
Why it's wrong here
Disabling persistence may reduce some I/O but CPU usage is more related to request processing.
- ✗
Enable encryption at rest to secure data.
Why it's wrong here
Encryption adds CPU overhead, making the problem worse.
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Last reviewed: Jun 20, 2026
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