BeginnerScenario
5 min
Overlapping Cron Jobs Causing Backlog
SchedulingOperationsPerformance
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Interview Question
Nightly maintenance jobs overlap and create resource contention and backlog. Explain your triage and prevention.
Key Points to Cover
- Map job runtimes and overlaps with observability
- Enforce concurrency locks and timeouts
- Stagger schedules or convert to queue-driven workers
- Right-size resources and add alerts on duration/SLA
Evaluation Rubric
Maps schedule and overlap clearly30% weight
Applies locking/timeouts30% weight
Reschedules or re-architects jobs20% weight
Adds duration/SLA monitoring20% weight
Hints
- 💡Consider leader election for distributed cron.
Potential Follow-up Questions
- ❓How to ensure exactly-once processing?
- ❓What about retries and idempotency?
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