A cloud administrator works for an online gaming company that is hosting its multiplayer servers in a public IaaS cloud. The following metrics are reported during a controlled beta test: RAM usage 80%

Doubling the number of VMs primarily scales processing capacity and might distribute load, but it does not directly address an extremely high ping, which is fundamentally a network latency or congestion issue.

An average ping of 800ms is extremely high and indicates severe network latency or congestion, which is critical for real-time online gaming performance. While 50% bandwidth usage might seem moderate, it could be an average, and increasing bandwidth on the multiplayer servers directly addresses potential bottlenecks at the server's network interface or uplink, offering the most immediate improvement for gamers.

RAM usage at 80% is high but generally acceptable, and while increasing RAM could slightly improve server processing, it is not the primary cause of an 800ms ping, which is clearly a network-related problem.

Deploying servers closer to the user base is a good long-term strategy for reducing baseline ping due to geographical distance. However, an 800ms ping suggests a more immediate problem like network congestion or insufficient server-side bandwidth, which increasing server bandwidth (B) addresses more directly and immediately.