I was asked a few technical questions in three different interview stages, with three different people.

Some questions were standard (e.g., swap every pair of nodes in a linked list).

Some were more advanced, mostly regarding multithreading and how to use it properly, including synchronization and efficiency.

You have an application that lets the user read/write data from a database, storage, or disk. These reads and writes occur mostly in big bursts, rather than spread out across time. How would you design the application to handle these bursts in a way that won't affect the user (as much as possible)? The problem is that these actions are time-consuming, and if they occur in bursts, the user will experience a significant delay.