PDE Ingesting and Processing the Data Practice Question
Your team has a Dataflow pipeline that reads from BigQuery, transforms data, and writes to GCS. The pipeline is failing with 'Out of Memory' errors on the worker nodes. The input data is large but fits within the total cluster memory. Which configuration change is most likely to resolve the issue without increasing costs significantly?
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
✓
Use a worker machine type with more memory, such as n2-highmem.
The default Dataflow worker machine type may have insufficient memory per core for the pipeline's operations. Using a high-memory machine type (e.g., n2-highmem) increases memory per worker without necessarily increasing the number of workers, thus controlling costs.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use a worker machine type with more memory, such as n2-highmem.
Why this is correct
High-memory machines provide more memory per core, addressing OOM.
- ✗
Shard the input into smaller reads using a BigQuery query.
Why it's wrong here
Sharding might help but it changes the pipeline logic and may not fix the memory issue if the transform is memory-intensive.
- ✗
Increase the disk size per worker.
Why it's wrong here
Disk size is for storage, not memory; OOM is a memory issue.
- ✗
Enable Dataflow Prime with vertical autoscaling.
Why it's wrong here
Vertical autoscaling adjusts memory within the same machine family, but may not increase memory enough if the default type is already too low.
Visual reference
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
One of 890 original PDE practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. 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.