We're seeing TCP/IP warning and quite a few connection failures on our web and SQL server (Win 2008 SP1 with IPv6 enabled) and it happens more often when the worker process/SQL server process has been running for a couple of days continuously. I am wondering what causes these warnings? What is the default number of TCP connections allowed and how can we bump this up?
TCP/IP failed to establish an outgoing connection because the selected local endpoint was recently used to connect to the same remote endpoint. This error typically occurs when outgoing connections are opened and closed at a high rate, causing all available local ports to be used and forcing TCP/IP to reuse a local port for an outgoing connection. To minimize the risk of data corruption, the TCP/IP standard requires a minimum time period to elapse between successive connections from a given local endpoint to a given remote endpoint.
It sounds kinda like your connections start failing and then are automatically retried. If the retries happen quickly enough TCP could cycle through the entire port range and all your ports will be in TIME-WAIT state (IIRC that's what the state's called, it's been a little while since I've been debugging TCP in detail).
A couple of things to understand first:
Then you have to look for clues as to why the connection is failing. Probably the outgoing connection is to a server, is the server up and running? Why wouldn't the server accept the connection - is the process/thread responsible for accepting the connection deadlocked, blocked on something, or has it exited? Is the network between the originator and the server working normally?