# Guided Exercise: Predict Before You Look

Before you run the real inspection commands in the Lab, commit to a guess — this is what makes
the real numbers meaningful instead of just scrolling past them.

## Your task

On paper or in a scratch file, write down your best GUESS for:

1. How many CPU cores does this machine have?
2. How much total RAM, roughly, in GB?
3. How much free disk space is on the root filesystem?

Then think through: which of these three would you expect a "student Lab" environment to be
MOST constrained on, and why? (Hint: think about what happens if 50 students are each running
their own Lab on one shared physical machine at the same time.)

## A worked shape to check yourself against

There's no single right numeric answer here — the point is the habit of predicting first. A
reasonable answer to the "most constrained" question: memory and CPU are typically the tightest
shared resource on a multi-tenant host, since every additional Lab needs its own slice of both,
while disk is comparatively cheap to over-provision.

## Instructor Notes

**Facilitation:** Have students commit to a number verbally or on a shared doc BEFORE anyone
runs the real commands — the value is in noticing the gap between guess and reality, not in
getting it right.

**Approximate timing:** 5 minutes.

**Optional extension:** ask what would happen to their guess if this were a "real" laptop
they personally own vs. a shared cloud server — good primer for later resource-limit
discussions (ROOT 06's resource requests/limits, ROOT 09's resource governance).