PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company runs SAP ERP 6.0 on an Oracle database on EC2. The system is experiencing high CPU usage on the database server during peak hours. Analysis shows that the CPU is consumed by log writes. Which configuration change can reduce CPU usage?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse storage performance improvements (like faster EBS volumes) with database-level tuning, assuming that faster I/O reduces CPU usage, when in fact the CPU is consumed by the overhead of too many small write operations, not by slow I/O.
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
✓
Increase the Oracle log buffer size to reduce the number of log write operations.
High CPU usage from log writes indicates that the database is spending excessive CPU cycles on writing redo log entries to disk. Increasing the Oracle log buffer size reduces the frequency of log write operations by allowing more redo data to accumulate before a write is triggered, thereby lowering CPU overhead. This directly addresses the root cause without changing storage or compute capacity.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Disable archiving of redo logs.
Why it's wrong here
Disabling archiving is not safe and may cause data loss.
- ✗
Switch from EBS gp3 to io2 Block Express volumes.
Why it's wrong here
Improves I/O but not CPU.
- ✗
Upgrade to a larger EC2 instance type with more vCPUs.
Why it's wrong here
Does not reduce log write CPU usage.
- ✓
Increase the Oracle log buffer size to reduce the number of log write operations.
Why this is correct
Larger log buffer reduces write frequency, lowering CPU usage.
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