Microsoft Internet Information Server Quality Control & Assurance 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which IIS diagnostic tool generates a detailed HTML report of server configuration, including potential misconfigurations that affect quality?
- IIS Diagnostics Toolkit / Best Practices Analyzer (Correct answer)
- Resource Monitor
- perfmon.exe
- netsh trace
Correct answer: IIS Diagnostics Toolkit / Best Practices Analyzer
The IIS Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) scans server configuration and highlights deviations from recommended quality and security settings.
Question 2: During load testing of an IIS server, you observe that the worker process CPU spikes to 100%. Which feature can automatically limit the CPU usage of an application pool?
- CPU Limit in Application Pool Advanced Settings (Correct answer)
- Request Filtering thresholds
- Output Cache size limits
- HTTP Keep-Alives setting
Correct answer: CPU Limit in Application Pool Advanced Settings
The CPU Limit setting in Application Pool Advanced Settings throttles or kills worker processes that exceed a configured CPU percentage.
Question 3: A QA team wants to detect memory leaks in an IIS application pool over time. Which built-in IIS setting can trigger an automatic recycle when private memory exceeds a threshold?
- Private Memory Limit under Application Pool recycling (Correct answer)
- Virtual Memory Limit set to zero
- Idle Time-out set to maximum
- Request Queue Length set to unlimited
Correct answer: Private Memory Limit under Application Pool recycling
The Private Memory Limit setting recycles the worker process when it consumes more than the specified amount of private memory, helping detect and mitigate memory leaks.
Question 4: Which HTTP status code indicates that IIS accepted a request but the upstream application returned no response, helping QA identify application-tier failures?
- 502 Bad Gateway (Correct answer)
- 403 Forbidden
- 301 Moved Permanently
- 206 Partial Content
Correct answer: 502 Bad Gateway
A 502 Bad Gateway from IIS indicates the server received an invalid response from an upstream application or backend server.
Question 5: To validate that SSL/TLS certificates on an IIS server meet organizational quality standards, which Windows tool provides certificate details and expiration dates?
- certmgr.msc (Certificate Manager) (Correct answer)
- diskpart.exe
- msconfig.exe
- regedit.exe
Correct answer: certmgr.msc (Certificate Manager)
Certificate Manager (certmgr.msc) lets administrators inspect installed certificates, including their validity periods and chain of trust.
Question 6: A QA engineer needs to confirm that HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) headers are correctly sent by IIS. Which IIS feature is used to add this response header?
- HTTP Response Headers module (Correct answer)
- URL Rewrite outbound rules
- Request Filtering response rules
- Dynamic Content Compression
Correct answer: HTTP Response Headers module
The HTTP Response Headers feature in IIS Manager allows administrators to add custom headers like Strict-Transport-Security to all responses.
Question 7: Which IIS sub-status code paired with HTTP 500 specifically indicates that the application pool is stopped or unavailable, helping QA isolate the failure layer?
- 500.13 (Web Server Too Busy) (Correct answer)
- 500.19 (Configuration Error)
- 500.0 (Module or ISAPI Error)
- 500.100 (Internal ASP Error)
Correct answer: 500.13 (Web Server Too Busy)
HTTP 500.13 indicates the web server is too busy, while a stopped app pool typically produces a 503; 500.0 through 500.100 map to specific IIS internal failures documented in the IIS error reference.
Microsoft Internet Information Server Quality Control & Assurance 3
Which IIS diagnostic tool generates a detailed HTML report of server configuration, including potential misconfigurations that affect quality?