Binary Searchmedium45 minDevOps / SRE Engineer

OnCall Minimum Feasible Throughput

DevOps / SRE Engineer signal: binary search on answer + monotonic predicate in a on-call routing context. This is a ProdMatch-owned devops sre drill, framed as a April 2026 PhonePe Incident Response simulation, not a copied platform question.

Company context

PhonePe · Incident Response

Freshness

April 2026

Product surface

on-call routing

ProdMatch interview simulation based on product-team patterns; not a claim of a real company question.

Question

For on-call routing, choose the minimum processing rate so all pages finish before deadline. Each worker can process rate units per minute, rounded up per item.

Input

Work item sizes and deadline minutes.

Output

Minimum integer rate.

Constraints

1 <= items.length <= 200000
1 <= item size <= 1e9
Deadline is at least items.length.

Concepts

blast-radius graphs
alert dedupe
rolling windows
binary search on answer
monotonic predicate

sizes [3,6,7,11], deadline=8 -> 4

Approach

Try framing your own approach first. The 30 seconds you think before peeking is where learning happens.

Clean Solution

Reveal the approach first.

How well did you understand?

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Common Mistakes

Use low + (high - low) // 2 to avoid overflow.
The predicate must be monotonic or binary search is invalid.

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