Recently traffic to the company web server has more than doubled, resulting in slower response times from the server. An administrator has decided to add a second, identical 10/100/1000 NIC to the…

Freeing up more ports on the switch does not directly address the server's traffic bottleneck; the existing switch already has four open ports available.

Server load balancing typically distributes traffic across multiple servers, not multiple NICs on a single server, and requires additional infrastructure like a load balancer device or software.

Moving the second network adapter to a new subnet would create a separate network segment for the server but would not aggregate bandwidth to handle increased traffic from a single source effectively.

Network adapter teaming (also known as NIC teaming or Link Aggregation Control Protocol - LACP) combines multiple network interfaces into a single logical interface. This increases the total bandwidth available to the server and provides fault tolerance, significantly improving performance for high-traffic servers like a web server.