A company is launching a photo sharing application on AWS.

AWS Lambda allocates CPU, network throughput, and other resources proportionally to the function’s configured memory. If a Lambda function is CPU-bound (common for image manipulation such as resizing and thumbnail generation) or limited by I/O throughput, increasing the configured memory often improves performance because it also increases the amount of CPU available to the function. This is a standard Lambda optimization technique: tune memory to reduce runtime and achieve a lower latency target.

In this scenario, the thumbnail generation is taking more than 2 minutes, but the requirement is to process each image in under 30 seconds. Without changing the code, the most direct lever is to increase the function’s memory setting and retest. As memory increases, Lambda provides more compute power, which can significantly speed up CPU-intensive libraries (for example, image decoding, resizing, encoding) and reduce overall execution time. Many workloads show near-linear improvements until other bottlenecks (such as downstream service latency) dominate.

Options A and B are not applicable to Lambda in this way. Lambda does not let you directly select a fixed number of vCPUs or choose an EC2 instance type such as m6a.4xlarge for a function; those are EC2 concepts, not Lambda configuration parameters. Option D (“burstable performance”) is also not a Lambda configuration model; burstable performance applies to certain EC2 instance families, not Lambda’s managed execution environment.

Therefore, the correct action is C: increase the Lambda function’s memory allocation (which also increases available CPU and throughput). This is the AWS-supported way to improve performance for compute-intensive Lambda functions and is the most likely to bring processing time down toward the 30-second requirement without code changes.