Not a nice and easy topic for Saturday breakfast, I'll agree.

We've been looking at improving the responsiveness and throughput of our web application.  There is a significant amount of processing and database I/O done on the application-layer, in a COM+ Server.  You can see where this is going, I'm sure.

I won't go in to the technical details, but suffice to say the logical step is to make use of Asynchronous pages in ASP.NET.  This article explains what we needed to do to make this happen, in addition to using custom threads (rather than threads straight out of the thread pool!) so that we maintain a high-level of throughput.  This was in ASP.NET 1.x.

These more recent articles (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163463.aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163725.aspx) quickly outlines the new technique.

It's important to remember that this is only a step in the right direction, we need to make sure that the back-end engine itself is all tickety-boo.