I am getting sporadic errors on a web service call:

"Server was unable to process request. --> An existing connection was
forcibly closed by the remote host."

followed by a series of error messages of the form:

"Server was unable to process request. --> No connection could be made
because thee target machine actively refused it."

This came about when a batch job began using this web service for geocoder
calls and appears to be bursty and random. I suspect the web service is
being overloaded with requests. Is that possible?