Question 1,229 of 1,660
SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company is running a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application is experiencing high latency. A Solutions Architect reviews the CloudWatch metrics and notices that the ALB's SurgeQueueLength is consistently high. What does this indicate, and how should the architect respond?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
The ALB is buffering requests because the backend instances are overwhelmed; increase the number of instances or improve instance performance.
A high SurgeQueueLength means the ALB is receiving more requests than the healthy instances can handle, causing queuing. Option B is wrong because surge queue is for HTTP requests, not connections. Option C is wrong because it is not a client-side issue. Option D is wrong because the queue is at the ALB level, not instance level.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
The ALB is buffering requests because the backend instances are overwhelmed; increase the number of instances or improve instance performance.
Why this is correct
SurgeQueueLength indicates request buffering; scaling out the backend will reduce latency.
- ✗
The backend instances are failing health checks; review the health check configuration.
Why it's wrong here
If instances were unhealthy, they would be deregistered; SurgeQueueLength would not be high if fewer instances are healthy.
- ✗
Clients are sending too many requests; implement API rate limiting.
Why it's wrong here
Rate limiting might help but the immediate cause is backend capacity, not client throttling.
- ✗
The ALB is experiencing a high number of new connections; increase the idle timeout setting.
Why it's wrong here
Idle timeout does not affect request queuing; it controls connection persistence.
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Last reviewed: Jun 20, 2026
This SAP-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SAP-C02 exam.
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