A company runs a monolithic application on a single server. During a load test, response times increase sharply when CPU utilization reaches 90%. The application uses a single database and a shared in-memory cache. Which component is the most likely bottleneck?

The server's CPU, since the application is monolithic and all processing happens on one machine

The database, because it is a single point of failure

The network bandwidth between the server and the clients

The in-memory cache, because it is shared and may cause contention

A company runs a client-server application where the server is a single machine with multiple CPUs. During a load test, the server's CPU utilization is at 100%, but the response time is still acceptable. The team wants to improve performance. Which action is most likely to help?

Reduce the number of concurrent users

A company is planning to migrate from a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture. The team is concerned about the performance impact of the migration. Which performance risk is most likely to be introduced by this migration?

Simplified performance testing because services are smaller

Decreased scalability because services are now separate

Increased network latency due to inter-service communication

Reduced resource contention because services are isolated

Which performance risk is most commonly associated with a microservices architecture?

Inability to scale individual components

Single point of failure in the application code

Network latency and overhead from inter-service communication

Resource contention within a single process

A team is performance testing a microservices application. They notice that one service, 'payment', has high latency, but its CPU and memory are low. The 'payment' service calls an external payment gateway. Which bottleneck is most likely?

The network between the payment service and the gateway is congested

The payment service has a memory leak

The external payment gateway is slow

The payment service's database is not indexed

Certified Tester Performance Testing

Domain 3Objective 2

Categories of Performance Risks for Different Architectures CT-PT Practice Questions (Page 5)

Part of the Performance Testing in the Software Lifecycle domain, which makes up ~19% of our current practice bank. ISTQB does not publish an official question count, but from its 90-minute exam (~35–60 total, ~7–11 in this domain), expect 2–3 from this objective — we provide 26 practice questions to prepare you well beyond it. (estimate)

26questions here

6free pages

4concepts

Questions 21–25

21application · medium
A company runs a monolithic application on a single server. During a load test, response times increase sharply when CPU utilization reaches 90%. The application uses a single database and a shared in-memory cache. Which component is the most likely bottleneck?
Select an answer first
22application · medium
A company runs a client-server application where the server is a single machine with multiple CPUs. During a load test, the server's CPU utilization is at 100%, but the response time is still acceptable. The team wants to improve performance. Which action is most likely to help?
Select an answer first
23application · medium
A company is planning to migrate from a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture. The team is concerned about the performance impact of the migration. Which performance risk is most likely to be introduced by this migration?
Select an answer first
24foundation · easy
Which performance risk is most commonly associated with a microservices architecture?
Select an answer first
25application · medium
A team is performance testing a microservices application. They notice that one service, 'payment', has high latency, but its CPU and memory are low. The 'payment' service calls an external payment gateway. Which bottleneck is most likely?
Select an answer first

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