Question 37 of 144
SK0-005 server-administration Practice Question
A company runs a popular public-facing e-commerce website hosted on a farm of five Windows Server 2019 web servers behind a hardware load balancer. Recently, users have been reporting intermittent '503 Service Unavailable' errors during peak shopping hours. The administrator checks the load balancer and finds that all servers are marked as healthy with low CPU and memory usage. However, when inspecting a sample server, the administrator notices a large number of TCP connections in the TIME_WAIT state, consuming all available ephemeral ports. The application is ASP.NET based and uses IIS. The server configuration is as follows: Windows Server 2019 Standard, 4 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM, default TCP/IP settings. The administrator needs to resolve the connectivity issues without making changes to the application code or altering the network architecture. Which of the following actions should the administrator take to fix the problem PERMANENTLY?
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
✓
Increase the ephemeral port range using netsh, and consider reducing the TIME_WAIT delay via registry settings.
Option A is correct because ephemeral port exhaustion is the root cause. Increasing the ephemeral port range provides more ports, and reducing TIME_WAIT delay frees them faster. Option B adds servers, which is a temporary workaround and does not prevent port exhaustion on each server. Option C requires nightly restarts, causing brief outages and not solving the underlying issue. Option D limits concurrent connections but may degrade performance and does not address port exhaustion.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Add two additional web servers to the farm to distribute the load.
Why it's wrong here
Adding servers may temporarily reduce load per server, but the underlying port exhaustion will still occur on each under high traffic.
- ✓
Increase the ephemeral port range using netsh, and consider reducing the TIME_WAIT delay via registry settings.
Why this is correct
This directly addresses the port exhaustion by expanding the available port pool and speeding up port recycling.
- ✗
Schedule a nightly restart of the IIS application pools.
Why it's wrong here
Nightly restarts would clear connections but cause downtime and do not prevent the port exhaustion during peak hours.
- ✗
Reduce the maximum number of concurrent connections in the IIS application pool settings.
Why it's wrong here
This might cap connections but could reject users and degrade performance without fixing the port shortage.
Visual reference
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Last reviewed: Jul 26, 2026
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