Software architects and developers all (hopefully) have to deal with performance and scalability eventually. It is important from a user's perspective to have a responsive site that also scales well. Performance and scalability should be designed into the application from the beginning, but there are also many things that can be done to bring incremental gains to an application. I just read the following post from Omar Al Zabir, CTO from PageFlakes.com, and I would recommend all Asp.Net developers to read it. The settings on modifying the machine.config file would are extremely helpful as I spent a good amount of time recently modifying them myself. His changes to the built-in profile code are also a must implement for large sites using Asp.net Profiles.
Here is a pretty inexpensive tool to help implement some of the caching tips that he recommends in the article as well: http://www.port80software.com/products/cacheright/
