Redundancy in a system primarily reduces the risk of single-point failures but may increase what?

• A. Latency due to extra hops
• B. CPU usage
• C. Throughput
• D. User authentication complexity

Answer: (A)

Redundancy primarily boosts availability by removing a single point of failure, but it can increase latency due to extra hops and processing. When you add redundant components, requests may travel through additional devices like load balancers, switches, or replication checks and must go through health checks and failover coordination. That extra routing and coordination time adds delay, so the overall response time can rise even though reliability improves. CPU usage and throughput aren’t the direct focus here—CPU load can go up from the extra monitoring, and throughput isn’t inherently increased by redundancy (it may stay the same or vary with design), while user authentication complexity isn’t directly tied to redundancy.