PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
A company is running a production SAP HANA database on an r5.4xlarge EC2 instance with EBS-backed storage. The operations team notices that the database checkpoint writes are frequently slow, causing application performance degradation. The team has already increased the EBS IOPS and throughput. What should the team do next to improve checkpoint write performance?
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
✓
Modify the Linux I/O scheduler to 'noop' and ensure the EBS-optimized instance attribute is enabled.
Modifying the Linux I/O scheduler to 'noop' reduces CPU overhead and prevents fragmentation of sequential writes, which is beneficial for SAP HANA checkpoint writes. Additionally, ensuring the EBS-optimized instance attribute is enabled guarantees dedicated bandwidth between the instance and EBS. Option B is incorrect because changing from io1 to gp2 would reduce performance, as gp2 has lower sustained IOPS and throughput compared to provisioned IOPS volumes. Option C is incorrect because disabling checkpoint compression would increase the volume of data written during checkpoints, worsening the performance issue. Option D is incorrect because simply increasing volume size does not directly improve checkpoint write performance; the team has already increased IOPS and throughput, so the bottleneck is likely I/O scheduling, not volume size.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Modify the Linux I/O scheduler to 'noop' and ensure the EBS-optimized instance attribute is enabled.
Why this is correct
Using noop scheduler reduces latency and improves sequential I/O performance for SAP HANA checkpoints.
- ✗
Change the EBS volume type from io1 to gp2 for higher throughput.
Why it's wrong here
gp2 has lower and burstable IOPS, which could degrade performance further.
- ✗
Disable SAP HANA checkpoint compression to reduce CPU overhead.
Why it's wrong here
Disabling compression increases I/O volume, potentially worsening checkpoint performance.
- ✗
Increase the EBS volume size to gain additional baseline IOPS.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing volume size does not guarantee better checkpoint write performance if I/O scheduling is the bottleneck.
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