Sample Answer
(S) In a microservices‑based payments system, we started seeing intermittent timeouts on the checkout API, especially during traffic spikes around promotions. (T) I was responsible for identifying the root cause and stabilizing the service without disrupting ongoing campaigns. (A) I first checked our dashboards and saw p95 latency jump from 450ms to over 2s on the payments‑orchestrator service. I enabled additional tracing with OpenTelemetry to follow requests across services and found a pattern: most slow requests hit a specific downstream currency‑conversion service. Logs showed connection pool exhaustion. I increased pool size, but the issue persisted, so I captured thread dumps and discovered blocking calls due to a retry loop with exponential backoff misconfigured. I adjusted retry policy (max 3 attempts, capped backoff), added circuit breakers, and introduced a small in‑memory cache for static FX rates, reducing external calls by ~60%. (R) p95 latency dropped back to ~400ms, timeouts went from 3% to under 0.2%, and we handled a 2.5x traffic spike during the next promotion without incidents.
Keywords
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