A city department's large file transfers between regions crawl even though CPU on both ends is mostly idle. Engineers suspect path MTU problems or thin links. What troubleshooting focus best matches the symptoms?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Idle CPUs with snail-speed copies usually mean the pipe—or the packet size the path will carry—is the bottleneck, not the processors. Measure latency, throughput, and MTU along the route before you buy bigger VMs.
Full Explanation
When a city department's large file transfers between regions crawl even though CPU on both ends is mostly idle, and engineers suspect path MTU problems or thin links, the troubleshooting focus that best matches is measuring latency, available bandwidth, and path MTU black-hole behavior along the transfer path. Idle CPU with slow transfers suggests the network path, not compute starvation. Increasing vCPUs on the source VM until utilization rises does not fix a constrained or black-holing path. Disabling encryption on the storage account to reduce CPU load is unnecessary when CPU is already idle and weakens security. Converting the workload from TCP to ICMP for bulk data movement is not a valid bulk-transfer design. Exam caveat: PMTUD black holes often need clamped MSS or corrected ICMP allow rules on civic firewalls along the path. Operational check: run throughput and latency tests, check for MTU black holes with ping/trace patterns, adjust MTU/MSS or routes, retest inter-region transfer speed, and document path findings for the networking team. In municipal cloud operations, record the chosen control and the rejected alternatives in the change or incident ticket so future on-call staff understand which failure modes were avoided for city services. Re-validate after the next maintenance window that the same decision still holds under current provider limits, identity bindings, and application versions used by the civic platform team.