Back in my old life I worked on some projects where getting the best performance out of SQL Server and ASP was pretty critical given the traffic load and the amount of hardware we had (or didn't have) to throw at the problem.

I learnt some pretty rough and ready rules, especially around SQL Optimization, the hard way and I'm always keen to find other resources that help ensure the smoothest end user experience for a web property without throwing unnecessary (and expensive) hardware resources at the problem.

It's nice to be able to learn some lessons from the folks with the biggest problems, especially when there are some nuggets in there that you can apply to sites even way down the scale.

One of my fellow Evangelists has posted a couple of really great case studies on using Visual Studio Team System to test and optimize a couple of sites who really do have to cope with scale in a very big way.