PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
An SAP Basis administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue on an SAP HANA database running on AWS. The database is on an EC2 instance of type r5.12xlarge with 8 x 1 TB EBS io2 Block Express volumes configured for maximum IOPS. The application team reports that batch jobs are taking longer than expected. The administrator checks Amazon CloudWatch metrics and sees that the EBS write latency averages 2 ms, which is within the expected range. However, the CPU utilization is at 95% consistently during batch runs. The HANA index server is using 70% of the CPU. The administrator also notices that the HANA threads are mostly waiting on 'lock wait' events. What is the MOST likely cause of the performance issue?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates may attribute high CPU utilization to an undersized instance or insufficient IOPS, when in fact the CPU is busy spinning on lock waits, a classic symptom of application-level contention rather than infrastructure limits.
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
✓
There are SQL statement contention and locking issues in the HANA database.
The high CPU utilization (95%) combined with HANA threads waiting on 'lock wait' events indicates that SQL statement contention and locking issues are the primary bottleneck. Lock waits occur when multiple transactions compete for the same database resources, causing threads to spin or block, which consumes CPU cycles without making progress. This explains why CPU is saturated despite EBS write latency being normal (2 ms) and IOPS being 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.
- ✗
The EBS volumes are not providing enough IOPS for the workload.
Why it's wrong here
Write latency is acceptable, so IOPS is likely sufficient.
- ✗
The HANA parameter 'max_concurrency' is set too low.
Why it's wrong here
Lock waits are not directly related to max_concurrency.
- ✓
There are SQL statement contention and locking issues in the HANA database.
Why this is correct
Lock waits indicate contention, often from poor SQL or application design.
- ✗
The EC2 instance type is undersized for the HANA workload.
Why it's wrong here
r5.12xlarge is suitable; CPU high due to contention, not capacity.
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