Question

A frontend web application deployed as a Deployment in the 'shop' namespace is responding slowly under load. The Deployment sets a CPU limit of 200m per container. You run 'kubectl top pods -n shop --containers' and observe the frontend container consistently reporting 200m CPU usage, matching its limit exactly, while node CPU is only 40% utilized overall. Pods are Running with no restarts. What is the most likely cause of the slow responses?

Accepted Answer

The container is being CPU throttled because it has hit its CPU limit; raising or removing the CPU limit would allow it to consume more CPU.

Answer

The node is out of allocatable CPU, so the scheduler cannot give the pod more capacity.

Answer

The metrics-server is reporting stale data and the real usage is much lower; the slowness is unrelated to CPU.

Answer

The pod is being OOMKilled repeatedly, which causes request latency spikes.