I've been working on a VB.NET/VS2008/AJAX/SQL Server project for over 2 years now without any real issues coming up. However, we're in the last week of our project doing some heavy stress testing and the project starts failing once I get about 150 simultaneous users. I've even gone so far as to create a stripped down version of the site which only logs in a user, pulls up their profile and then logs off. That still fails under stress. When I says "fails" I mean the CPU's are spiked and the App Pool eventually crashes. This is running on a Windows 2008 R2 duo quad server w/ 16 gig of memory. The memory never spikes but the CPU tops out.
I ran YSlow on the site and it pointed out that I needed to compress the .axd files, etc... I did that by implementing Gzip compression on everything but that's what got me to the 150 users. I run YSlow now and it says everything is "A".
I'm really not sure where to go from here. I'd be more than willing to share the stripped down version of the site for anyone to review. I'm not sure if it's the server, my code or the web.config.