EBS/EC2 Performance Bottleneck Diagnostic Troubleshooter (Part 1)
Use the interactive troubleshooter below to identify your EBS/EC2 performance bottleneck symptom, review the raw evidence, understand the root cause, and apply the recommended fix.
🚨 Step 1: What specific error symptom are you experiencing?
Please click the most accurate description:
Quick Reference Table
| # | Scenario | Key Error Signal | Root Cause | The Fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SSD Instance Store Write Amplification (Silent Performance Degradation) | "significantly increased write amplification, increased latency, and dramatically reduced I/O performance" | The SSD controller performs garbage collection overhead when writing bytes that are not aligned to a 4,096-byte boundary or when the disk is near full capacity. | Leave 10% of the volume unpartitioned so that the SSD controller can use it for over-provisioning, or use the TRIM command. |
| 2 | Amazon EBS Snapshot Creation Concurrency Ceiling | ConcurrentSnapshotLimitExceeded | You have exceeded the limit of one pending snapshot for a single st1 or sc1 volume, or five pending snapshots for other volume types. | Wait for one or more of the pending snapshots to complete before creating another snapshot of that volume. |
| 3 | Burstable Performance Instance CPU Throttling Wall | CPUCreditBalance limit depleted; CPU utilization is gradually lowered to the baseline level | A burstable performance instance configured as standard depletes its accrued CPU credit balance because average CPU utilization consistently exceeds the baseline. | aws ec2 modify-instance-credit-specification --region us-east-1 --instance-credit-specification "InstanceId=i-1234567890abcdef0,CpuCredits=unlimited" |
| 4 | EBS Volume Lazy Loading Latency (Silent Performance Degradation) | "significant increase in the latency of an I/O operation the first time each block is accessed" | Storage blocks on volumes created from snapshots load lazily in the background and must be pulled down from Amazon S3 before they can be accessed. | Force immediate initialization of the entire volume or enable fast snapshot restore. |