I'm placing this here as a note to read this again someday (and hopefully to have others read it). What a great article - http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/01/ASPNETPerformance/.

Very brief overview:

1. Reduce the time and number of round trips to the database by returning multiple resultsets.
2. Learn to optimize the paging feature of ASP.NET's GridView control.
3. Leveraging connection pooling (http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2004/02/09/connpool.html).
4. Understand and use the ASP.NET caching API (http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/022802-1.aspx).
5. Think about caching data frequently used during the lifetime of a single request.
6. Background processing. Here I'm dissapointed he didn't mention asynchronous pages in ASP.NET - but I know what he's getting at (http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/10/WickedCode/).
7. Page-level output caching (http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/022802-1.aspx).
8. Run IIS 6.0 (7.0?). He really likes (and so do I) the concept of kernel-mode page output caching.
9. Use GZIP compression. Duh (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/25d2170b-09c0-45fd-8da4-898cf9a7d568.mspx?mfr=true).
10. ViewState optimizations. Honestly - in my tasks, I turn off ViewState as much as possible.