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Interview Question
Multiple services are failing with timeout errors when calling an internal API. How do you approach debugging?
Key Points to Cover
- Check API latency, error rates, and load
- Inspect service-to-service networking and DNS
- Validate connection pools and retries
- Check upstream health and rate limits
- Isolate failing region or data center if needed
Evaluation Rubric
Uses metrics to confirm timeouts30% weight
Checks network/DNS connectivity30% weight
Considers connection pool exhaustion20% weight
Localizes to region/DC issues20% weight
Hints
- 💡Timeouts can hide dependency failures.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- ⚠️Focusing solely on the API without considering client-side retry logic.
- ⚠️Ignoring network connectivity and DNS as potential culprits.
- ⚠️Jumping to code changes without sufficient data gathering and analysis.
- ⚠️Not correlating timeout events with infrastructure resource utilization.
- ⚠️Failing to consider the impact of large or malformed request/response payloads.
Potential Follow-up Questions
- ❓How do you set timeout budgets?
- ❓What about retry storms?
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