28 Tips for improving ASP performance and appearance 1-6 (from Ms)-July article, it seems

28 Tips for improving ASP performance and appearance Len Cardinal, Senior Advisor, Microsoft Consulting Services George v. Reilly Microsoft IIS performance lead adapted from Nan Cy Cluts's Article Developer technical Engineer Microsoft Corporation April 2000 Summary: This article describes the techniques for optimizing ASP applications and VBScript.
Introduction performance is a feature. You must design the performance beforehand, or you will have to rewrite the application later. That is, what are some good strategies for enabling Active Server Pages (ASP) application performance to be optimal? This article describes techniques for optimizing ASP applications and Visual basic®scripting Edition (VBScript). This article discusses a number of pitfalls. The recommendations listed in this article have been tested in http://www.microsoft.com and other sites with significant results. This article assumes that you have a basic understanding of ASP development, including VBScript and/or JScript, ASP application, ASP sessions, and other ASP-intrinsic objects (Request, Response, and Server).
Typically, ASP performance is largely dependent on a number of factors outside the ASP code itself. We don't list all the information in an article, and at the end of this article we list the resources that are related to performance. These links cover ASP and non-ASP topics, including ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO), Component Object Model (COM), database, and Internet information Server (IIS) configuration. These are some of our favorite links-be sure to go and see.
Tip 1: Cache frequently used data in a typical ASP page on a WEB server to retrieve data from the back-end data store, and then convert the results to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Retrieving data from memory is much faster than retrieving data from the back-end data store, regardless of the speed of the database. Reading data from a local hard disk is usually faster than retrieving data from the database. As a result, you can typically cache data on a WEB server (stored in memory or on a disk) to improve performance.
Caching is a traditional way of exchanging time in space. If you're caching the right content, you can see a significant improvement in performance. For caching to be valid, data that is frequently reused must be saved, and a large (modest) overhead is needed to recalculate the data. If all of the cached data is stale, it can cause memory waste.
Data that is infrequently changed is a good candidate for caching because you do not have to worry about synchronizing the data with the database over time. combo box lists, reference tables, DHTML fragments, Extended Markup Language (XML) strings, menu items, and site configuration variables, including data source names (DSNs), Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and Web paths, are good candidates for caching. Note that you can cache the "representation" of the data without caching the data itself. If ASP pages are rarely changed and the cache is expensive (for example, the entire product catalog), you should consider producing HTML in advance, rather than showing it again in response to each request.