Improving .Net Application Performance and Scalability

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/improving_net_application_performance_and_scalability.htm]

I've been reading a great book, Improving .Net Application Performance and Scalability. While I'm aware of the standard performance issues (minimize calls to the database, reduce postbacks, cache, use client validation, DataReader vs. DataSet, etc...), I've really been impressed with the book so far. It's about a 1000 pages, and is very thorough yet practical.

I admit that I was surprised at the resourcefulness of some of their suggestions, such as how to improve ASP.Net performance by trimming page size:

• Remove unnecessary white space between tags
• Avoid long control names (it gets rendered into HTML)
• Save JavaScript to separate physical files not just for code reuse, but also so that the client can cache it.

They also suggest several tools to help monitor performance:

• CLR Profiler for memory allocation in managed code
• Application Center Test (ACT) for ASP.Net pages
• SQL Profiler for SQL Server Databases
• Perfmon for Performance counters in code