Improve and measure service performance
TikTokSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen
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This question evaluates performance engineering and observability skills—specifically SLIs/SLOs definition, instrumentation and profiling, load-testing, bottleneck identification, and optimization trade-offs for stateless HTTP microservices.
How would you assess and improve a service’s performance under high load? Define the key SLIs/SLOs you would set (e.g., latency percentiles, throughput, error rate), describe how you would instrument and profile the system, outline a load-testing plan, identify likely bottlenecks (CPU, I/O, database, cache, network), and propose concrete optimizations with trade-offs.
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