Josh Wieder

NPR's Sami Yenigun has a story discussing the importance of high performance video streaming making the rounds on their site and radio properties today. The time when companies could get away with a poor web presence is over. Here is my favorite quote: "What we found was that people are pretty patient for up to two seconds," Sitaraman says. "If you start out with, say, 100 users — if the video hasn't started in five seconds, about one-quarter of those viewers are gone, and if the video doesn't start in 10 seconds, almost half of those viewers are gone."

When thinking about launching an .NET application with IIS, memory tuning the webserver is often ignored. I often complained about how php.ini offered more straightforward means to address performance tuning - but I was wrong. Windows Server reserves half of its available RAM for the operating system. Of the remaining RAM, by default IIS will only allow 60% to be allocated to applications (in v1.0 I think it was actually 40%, in later versions its more generous). This setting is configurable, and can be set in your machine.config of the relevant framework path (%system% Microsoft.NET\Framework\) by adjusting the memoryLimit parameter . I recommend not reserving more than 80%. There is a ton to do here, and more than I can address in one post. Benchmarking these settings in development is a necessity, so do the needful and check out this overview here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff647813.aspx