PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
An SAP Basis administrator notices that the SAP application is running slowly during peak hours. The system is deployed on a single r5.8xlarge instance with 256 GiB of memory. CloudWatch metrics show high CPU utilization but moderate memory usage. Which action should the architect take to improve performance?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to assume high CPU utilization always requires a larger instance (Option A) or a storage fix (Options B and C), but the PAS-C01 exam tests the ability to match instance families to workload characteristics, specifically that compute-optimized instances (c5) are the correct choice for CPU-bound SAP applications, not memory-optimized ones.
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
✓
Change the instance type to c5.9xlarge
The high CPU utilization with moderate memory usage indicates a compute-bound workload, not a memory-bound one. Changing from an r5.8xlarge (32 vCPUs, 256 GiB memory) to a c5.9xlarge (36 vCPUs, 72 GiB memory) provides more vCPUs and a better compute-to-memory ratio, directly addressing the CPU bottleneck. This aligns with SAP's recommendation to match instance types to workload characteristics, where compute-optimized instances are suitable for CPU-intensive SAP applications.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the instance memory by selecting r5.12xlarge
Why it's wrong here
More memory does not address high CPU utilization.
- ✗
Increase the size of the EBS root volume
Why it's wrong here
Increasing volume size does not affect CPU performance.
- ✗
Add Provisioned IOPS to the EBS volumes
Why it's wrong here
Provisioned IOPS improves disk I/O, not CPU performance.
- ✓
Change the instance type to c5.9xlarge
Why this is correct
c5.9xlarge provides more vCPUs (36) compared to r5.8xlarge (32) and is compute-optimized.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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