PDE Maintaining and Automating Data Workloads Practice Question
A company runs a Dataflow pipeline that processes a high-volume data stream. They notice that the pipeline's worker CPU utilisation is near 100% and the system lag is increasing. Which three actions can improve performance? (Choose three.)
⚠ Common exam trap
A common trap is assuming that increasing disk size (Option A) improves CPU-related performance issues. In Dataflow, increasing disk size only helps with storage bottlenecks (e.g., shuffle disk overflow), not with high CPU utilization or system lag.
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 number of workers.
Increasing the number of workers distributes the processing load across more parallel workers, reducing CPU utilization per worker and allowing the pipeline to keep up with the incoming data stream. This directly addresses both high CPU usage and increasing system lag by scaling out horizontally.
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 worker disk size.
Why it's wrong here
Disk size does not directly affect CPU utilisation; it may help with shuffle but not CPU-bound processing.
- ✓
Increase the number of workers.
Why this is correct
More workers distribute the load and reduce CPU per worker.
- ✗
Use batch processing instead of streaming.
Why it's wrong here
Switching to batch would change the architecture and may not be suitable for the requirement.
- ✓
Enable Dataflow Streaming Engine.
Why this is correct
Streaming Engine offloads state management to external services, reducing CPU overhead.
- ✓
Use higher-CPU machine types (e.g., n2-highcpu).
Why this is correct
Higher CPU capacity allows each worker to process more data.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every PDE question from scratch — 890 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PDE practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the PDE exam.