I have an Access 2010 application. Access is only the Frontend. The Backend is a SQL-Server 2008. The connection between, is ODBC. The ODBC driver is „SQL Server“ (Version 6.01.7601.17514).
I Access is a table with over 500.000 rows. Every row has 58 columns. So the performance is very, very slow, at the most time. To search for one column is not possible, Access is freezing.
I know, that’s not a new Problem...
Now my questions:
Is the driver ok? Because, when I create an ODBC-Connection local (Windows 8), I can choose also the driver „SQL Server“. But here is the version 6.03.9600.17415.
Is there a difference between the speed? I've got a feeling, that, when I use the Acc local under Win8 with the newer driver, it is faster than Terminal Server and older driver.
Local under Win8 I can also choose the driver „SQL Server Native Client 10.0“ (Version 2009.100.1600.01). What ist he difference between those „Win8-ODBC-Drivers“? Which driver would you use and why?
What is with a newer SQL Server? For example 2014 vs 2008. Is 2014 faster than 2008 with ODBC?
What is about the Server-Hardware? When I use a SSD instead oft he HDD? Make a SSD the ODBC-Connection faster?
All users are working on the Terminal Servers. Main with Office 2010, but also with proAlpha (ERP-System). And also with the Access. Now one user told me, that sometimes, if not many users on the TS‘, Access is much faster. What do you mean? When take one TS and work on it, only with Access, not with other application. Is then the ODBC faster?
What can I try else?
Thank you very much.
I have noticed some performance improvements with SQL Server Native Client 10.0 also using Sql Server 2008 with Access 2010, over the original Native Client.
I would question why you need search/load all 500,000 rows of your table. Assuming this is in a form, it sounds a bit like poor form design. All your forms should only load the records you are interested in, not all records by default. In fact it's considered reasonably good practice to not load any records on form load, until you know what the user is looking for.
58 Columns also sounds a little excessive - are there memo (varchar(Max)) fields included in these columns? These should probably be moved into a separate table. examine your data structure and see if you have normalised it correctly.
Are your fields indexed correctly? If you are searching on them an index will considerably improve performance.
Creating views on sql server that only return a suitable subset of records, that can then be linked as tables within Access can also have performance benefits.
A table with 500,000 rows is small – even for Access. Any search you do should give results in WELL UNDER 1 SECOND!
The best way to approach this is to ask a 90 year old lady at a bus stop the following question:
When you use an instant teller machine does it make sense to download EVERY account and THEN ask the user for the account number? Even 90 year old ladies at bus stops will tell you it would be FAR better to ASK for the account number and then download 1 record!
And when you use Google, you don’t download the WHOLE internet and THEN ask the user what to search for. Or do you create one huge massive web page that you then say use ctrl+f to search that huge browser page.
So think about how near all software works. That software does not download and prepare all the data local and THEN ask you what you want to look for. You do the reverse!
So the simple solution here is to ask the user BEFORE you start pulling data from the server. Build a form that looks like this:
Then, to match the search (say on LastName), you use this code in
after update of the text box.
Dim strSQL As String
strSQL = "select * from tblCustomers where LastName like '" & Me.txtLastName & "*'"
Me.RecordSource = strSQL
That way the form ONLY pulls the data you require – this approach even with 10 million rows will run INSTANT on your computer. The above uses a "*" so only the first few chars of the LastName need be typed in. The result is a form of "choices" You can then jump or edit the one record by clicking on the "glasses" button in above. That simply launches + opens one detail form. the Code is:
docmd.OpenForm "frmCustomer",,,"id = " & me!id
Let’s address a few more of your questions:
Is there a difference between the speed? (ODBC drivers)
No, there really no difference in the driver’s performance wise – they all perform about the same and users likely will never see or notice the difference in performance when using different drivers.
For example 2014 vs 2008. Is 2014 faster than 2008 with ODBC?
Not usually. I mean think of ANY experience you have with computers (unless you are new to computers?). Every time you upgrade to new Word, or new Accounting program, that program is larger, takes longer to load, uses more memory, uses more disk space, and near always uses more processing. So given the last 30 years of desktop computers, in almost EVERY case, the next newer version of software requires more ram, more disk, more processing and thus runs slower than the previous version of that software (I willing to be that is YOUR knowledge and experience – so newer versions tend not to run faster – there are a few “rare” exceptions in computer history, but later versions of any software tends to require more computer resources and not less.
Now one user told me, that sometimes, if not many users on the TS‘, Access is much faster. What do you mean?
The above has nothing to do with ODBC drivers. In the above context when you are using Terminal Server, the both the database application and the front end (Access) are running on the same computer/server. What this means is that data transfer from the server to the application is BLISTERING fast and occurs not at network speed, but at computer speed (since both database and application are running on the SAME server). You could install Access on each computer, and then have Access pull data OVER the network from the server to the client workstation – this is slow since there is a network. With TS then the application and server run very fast without a network in-between. The massive processing and speed of the application and server can work together – once the data is pulled and the screen rendered, then ONLY the screen data comes down the network wire. The result is thus FAR FASTER than running Access on each workstation.
that sometimes, if not many users on the TS‘,
Correct, since the users application is running on the server, then no network exists between the application and the SQL server. However since each user has their application running on the server (as opposed to each workstation computer), then more load and resources are required on the server. If many users are using the server, then the server now has a big workload since the server has to run both SQL server and also allocate memory and processing for each copy of Access running on that server.
A traditional setup means that Access runs on each computer. So the memory and CPU to run Access occurs on each workstation – the server does not have to supply Access with CPU and memory, the server ONLY runs SQL server and facilities requests for data from each workstation. However because networks are FAR slower then processing data on one computer, then your bottle neck is not processing, but the VERY limited network speed. Since both Access and SQL and all processing is occurring on the server, then it is far easier to overload the resources and capacity of that server. However the speed of the network is usually the slowest link in computer setups. Since all processing and data crunching occurs server side, only the RESULTING screens and display is sent down the network wire. If the computer software has to process 1 million rows of data, and then display ONE total result, then only 1 total result comes down the network wire that is displayed. If you run Access local on each workstation and process 1 million rows, then 1 million rows of data must come down he network pipe (however, you can modify your Access design to have SQL server to FIRST process the data before it comes down the network pipe to avoid this issue. However with TS since Access is not running on your computer, then you don’t worry about network traffic – but you MUST STILL worry about how much data Access grabs from SQL server – thus the above tips about ONLY loading the data you require into a form. So don’t load huge data sets into the Access form, but simply ask the user BEFORE you start pulling that data from SQL server.
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I was asked this question once at an interview:
"Suppose you own a website where the server is at some remote location. One day, some user calls/emails you saying the site is abominably slow. How would you identify why the site is slow? Also, when you check the website yourself as any user would (using your browser), the site behaves just fine."
I could think of only one thing (which was shot down):
Check the server logs to analyse incoming traffic. Maybe a DoS attack or exceptionally high traffic. Interviewer told me to assume the server has normal traffic and no DoS.
I was kind of lost because I had never thought of this problem. I have almost no idea how running a server/website works. So if someone could highlight a few approaches, it would be nice.
While googling around, I could find only this relevant, wonderful article. That article is kind of too technical for me now, but I'm slowly breaking it down and understanding it.
Since you already said when you check the site yourself the speed is fine, this means that (at least for the pages you checked) there is nothing wrong with the server and it can serve those pages at a good speed. What you should be figuring out at this point is what the difference is between you and the user that reports your site is slow. It might be a lot of different things:
Is the user using a slow network connection (mobile for example)?
Does the user experience the same problems with other websites hosted at the same webhoster? If so, this could indicate a network problem. Normally this could also indicate a resource problem at the webserver, but in that case the site would also be slow for you.
If neither of the above leads to an answer, you could assume that the connection to the server and the server itself are fine. This means the problem must be in the users device. Find out which browser/OS he uses and try to replicate the problem. If that fails find out if he uses any antivirus or similar software that might cause problems.
This is a great tool to find the speed of web pages and tells you what makes it slow: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
I think one of the important thing that is missing from above answers is the server location, which can play a vital in web performance.
When someone is saying that it is taking a longer time to open a web page that means high latency. High latency can be caused due to server location.
Let's assume as you are the owner of the web page then the server and client are co-located, so it will have a low latency.
But, now if client is across the border, then latency time will increase drastically. And hence a slow perfomance.
Another factor is caching which drastically affects the latency time.
Taking the example of facebook, they have server all over the world to reduce the latency time (and also to provide several other advantages) and they use huge caching system to cache their hot data (trending topics) whereas cold data (old data) are stored in hard disk so it takes a longer time to load an older photo or post.
So, a user might would have complained about this as they were trying load up some cold data.
I can think of these few reasons (first two are already mentioned above):
High Latency due to location of client
Server memory might need to be increased
Number of service calls from the page.
If a service could be down at the time of complaint, it could prevent page from loading.
The server load might be too high at the time of the poor experience. The server might need to increase the resources (e.g. adding another server/web server to the cluster).
Check if there was any background job running on the server at that time.
It is important to check the logs and schedules of the batch jobs to determine what all was running at that time.
Hope this help.
Normally the user takes the page loading time as a measure to find out that the site is slow. But if you really want to know that what is taking the maximum time the you can open the browser debugger by pressing f12. if your browser is chrome the click on network and see what calls your application is making and which are taking maximum time. If you are using Firefox the you need to install firebug. If you have that, then again press f12 and click on Net.
One reason could be the role of the user is different of your role. You might be having suppose an administrator privilege (some thing like super user role) and the code might be just allowing everything for such role that means it does not really do much of conditional checking to see what is allowed or not. Some times, it's a considerable over ahead to get all the privileges of the user and have the conditions checking, how course depends how how the authorization is implemented. That means, the page might be really slow for specific roles. Hence, you should find out the roles of the user and see if that is a reason.
Obviously an issue with the connection of the person connecting to your site OR it's possible it was a temporary issue and by the time you checked your site, everything was dandy. You could check your logs or ask your host if there was an issue at the time the slow down occured.
This is usually a memory issue and it can be resolved by increasing the Heap Size of the Web Server hosting the application. In case the application is running on Weblogic Server. Heap size can be increased in "setEnv" file located in Application Home.
Goodluck!
Michael Orebe
Though your question is quite clear, web site optimisation is a very extensive subject.
The majority of the popular web developing frameworks are for some reason, extremely processor inefficient.
The old fashioned way of developing n-tier web applications is still very relevant and is still considered to be best practice according the W3C. If you take a little time to read the source code structure of the most popular web developing frameworks you will see that they run much more code at the server than is necessary.
This may seem a bit of a simple answer but, the less code you run at the server and the more code you run at the client the faster your servers will work.
Sometimes contrasting framework code against the old fashioned way is the best way to get an understanding of this. Here is a link to a fully working mini web application which represents W3C best practices and runs the minimum amount of code at the server and the maximum amount of code at the client: http://developersfound.com/W3C_MVC_EX.zip this codebases is also MVC compliant.
This codebase comes with a MySQL database dump, php and client side code. To see this code in action you will need to restore the SQL dump to a MySQL instance (sql dump came from MySQL 8 Community) and add the user and schema permissions that are found in the php file (conn_include.php); setting the user to have execute permissions on the schema.
If you contrast this code base against all of the most popular web frameworks, it will really open your eyes to just how inefficient these frameworks are. The popular PHP frameworks that claim to be MVC frameworks aren’t actually MVC compliant at all. This is because they rely on embedding PHP tags inside HTML tags or visa-versa (considered very bad practice according the W3C). Also most popular node frameworks run way more code at the server than is necessary. Embedded tags also stop asynchronous calls from working properly unless the framework supports AJAX dumps such as Yii 2.
Two of the most important rules to follow with MVC compliance is: never embed server side tags (such as PHP tags) in HTML tags or visa-versa (unless there is a very good excuse such as SEO) and religiously never write code to run at the server if it can be run at the client. Also true MVC is based on tier separation, where as the MVC frameworks are based on code separation. True MVC compliance is very processor efficient. Don’t get me wrong MVC frameworks are very useful for a lot of things, but if you’re developing a site that is going to get millions of hits, they are quite useless, or at least they will drive your cloud bills so high that it will really eat into your company’s profits.
In summary frameworks don’t give much control over what code runs at the client or server and are very inefficient but you can get prototypes up and running quicker with less code.
In contrast the old fashioned way takes a bit more elbow grease but you have complete control over what runs at the server and what runs at the client.
As an additional bit of advice for optimisation avoid using pass-through queries and triggers and instead opt for stored procedures. Historically stored procedures weren’t invented at the time MVC was present as a paradigm but it definitely increases separation of concerns between the tiers and is much more processor efficient.
Hope this advice helps.
I have an application that talks to several internal and external sources using SOAP, REST services or just using database stored procedures. Obviously, performance and stability is a major issue that I am dealing with. Even when the endpoints are performing at their best, for large sets of data, I easily see calls that take 10s of seconds.
So, I am trying to improve the performance of my application by prefetching the data and storing locally - so that at least the read operations are fast.
While my application is the major consumer and producer of data, some of the data can change from outside my application too that I have no control over. If I using caching, I would never know when to invalidate the cache when such data changes from outside my application.
So I think my only option is to have a job scheduler running that consistently updates the database. I could prioritize the users based on how often they login and use the application.
I am talking about 50 thousand users, and at least 10 endpoints that are terribly slow and can sometimes take a minute for a single call. Would something like Quartz give me the scale I need? And how would I get around the schedular becoming a single point of failure?
I am just looking for something that doesn't require high maintenance, and speeds at least some of the lesser complicated subsystems - if not most. Any suggestions?
This does sound like you might need a data warehouse. You would update the data warehouse from the various sources, on whatever schedule was necessary. However, all the read-only transactions would come from the data warehouse, and would not require immediate calls to the various external sources.
This assumes you don't need realtime access to the most up to date data. Even if you needed data accurate to within the past hour from a particular source, that only means you would need to update from that source every hour.
You haven't said what platforms you're using. If you were using SQL Server 2005 or later, I would recommend SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) for updating the data warehouse. It's made for just this sort of thing.
Of course, depending on your platform choices, there may be alternatives that are more appropriate.
Here are some resources on SSIS and data warehouses. I know you've stated you will not be using Microsoft products. I include these links as a point of reference: these are the products I was talking about above.
SSIS Overview
Typical Uses of Integration Services
SSIS Documentation Portal
Best Practices for Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2008
I've got an old classic asp/sql server app which is constantly throwing 500 errors/timeouts even though the load is not massive. Some of the DB queries are pretty intensive but nothing that should be causing it to fall over.
Are there any good pieces of software I can install on my server which will show up precisely where the bottlenecks are in either the asp or the DB?
Some tools you can try:
HP (formerly Mercury) LoadRunner or Performance Center
Visual Studio Application Center Test (Enterprise Editions only?)
Microsoft Web Application Stress tool (aka WAS, aka "Homer"; predecessor to Application Center Test)
WebLoad
MS Visual Studio Analyzer if you want to trace through the application code. This can show you how long the app waits on DB calls, and what the SQL was that was used. You can then use the SQL profiler to tune the queries.
Where is the timeout occurring? Is it at lines when ASP is connecting/executing sql? If so your problem is either with the connection to the db server or at the db itself. Load up SQL profiler in MSSQL to see how long the queries take. Perhaps it is due to locks in the database.
Do you use transactions? If so make sure they do not lock your database for a long time. Make sure you use transactions in ADO and not on the entire ASP page. You can also ignore lock in SQL Selects by using WITH (NOLOCK) hint on tables.
Make sure you database is optimized with indexes.
Also make sure you are conencted to the DB for as shortest time as possible i.e (example not working code): conn.open; set rs = conn.execute(); rs.close; conn.close. So store recordsets in a variable instead of looping through while holding the connection to the DB open. A good way is to use GetRows() function in ADO.
Always explicitly close and set ADO objects to nothing. This can cause the connection to the DB to remain open.
Enable connection pooling.
Load ADO constants in global.asa if you are using them
Do not store any objects in session or application scopes.
Upgrade to latest versions of ADO, MDac, SQL Server service packs etc.
Are you sure the server can handle the load? Maybe upgrade it? Is it on shared hosting? Maybe your app is not the problem.
It is quite simple to measure a script performance by timing it from the 1 line to the last line. This way you can identify slow running pages.
Have you tried running the SQL Server Profiler on the server? It will highlight any unexpected activity hitting the database from the app as well as help identifying badly performing queries.
If you're happy that the DB queries are needfully intensive then perhaps you need to set more appropriate timeouts on those pages that use these queries.
Set the Server.ScriptTimeout to something larger, you may also need to set the timeout on ADO Command objects used by the script.
Here's how I'd approach it.
Look at the running tasks on the server. Which is taking up more CPU time - SQL server or IIS? Most of the time, it will be SQL server and it certainly sounds that way based on your post. It's very rare that any ASP application actually does a lot of processing on the ASP side of things as opposed to the COM or SQL sides.
Use SQL Profiler to check out all the queries hitting the database server.
Deal with the low-hanging fruit first. Generally you will have a few "problem" queries that hit the database frequently and chew up a lot of time. Deal with these. (A truism in software development is that 10% of the code chews up 90% of the execution time...)
In addition to looking at query costs with SQL Profiler and Query Analyzer/SQL Studio and doing the normal SQL performance detective work you might also want to check if your database calls are returning inordinate amounts of data to your ASP code. I've seen cases where innocuous-looking queries returned HUGE amounts of unneeded data to ASP - the classic ("select * from tablename") kind of query written by lazy/inexperienced programmers that returns 10,000 huge rows when the programmer really only needed 1 field from 1 row. The reason I mention this special case is because these sorts of queries often have low execution times and low query costs on the SQL side of things and can therefore slip under the radar.
I have an ASP .NET application that connects to an Oracle or a SQL Server database. An installer has been developed to install a fresh database to an existing SQL Server using sql commands such as "restore database..." which simply restores a ".bak" file which we keep under source control.
I'm very new to Oracle and our application has only recently been ported to be compatible with 10g.
We are currently using the "exp.exe" tool to generate a ".dmp" file and then using the "imp.exe" to import it into a developers box.
How would you go about creating an "Oracle Database Installer"?
Would you create the database using script files and then populate the database with required default data?
Would you run the "imp.exe" tool behind the scenes?
Do we need to provide a clean interface for system administrators so that they can just select the destination server and have done, or should we just provide them with the ".dmp" file? What are the best practices?
Thanks.
The question is -- what do your customers know about Oracle?
Nothing? You should probably rethink this position. Oracle is very large and complex. If you assume your customers know nothing, you'll then start providing tutorials and help that's inappropriate.
Minimally Competent? If they're competent, they know enough to run imp by themselves. Also, they know enough to run a script that executes SQL.
Actual DBA's? Most organizations that can afford Oracle can afford real DBA's. Real DBA's can cope with a lot of things -- they do not need much hand-holding. Some of them like to assign storage parameters according to their shop standards.
You should provide a script with reasonable defaults. You should define your script in a way that someone can easily find all of your storage parameters and tweak them if necessary.
Your initial data can be via export/import or via a script. I prefer a script.
I have done this repeatedly from both sides (consumer and provider) as a DBA, developer, and architect.
As a provider, one of my grand accomplishments (in 1996) was the creation of an installation CD for a commercial insurance claims management software product targeted to the largest insurance carriers (a multi-million dollar item). That installation CD installed the Oracle 7.2 RDBMS engine, the FileNet optical storage system (scans paper documents and creates cataloged binary versions), and our custom claim-processing application (built in VB 4.0), all integrated and ready to run. As part of the installation process, the user could skip the Oracle software installation or customize it, and the user could customize/override the database configuration in all of its major details (database, schemas, tablespaces, sizes, disks, etc.).
I also provided the field service for this product, which included traveling to the client site as necessary. I tested the installation CD literally hundreds of times under every imaginable scenario that I could replicate, and we NEVER had a field failure that required even a phone call, let alone a trip (I did travel on four occasions, but for pre-sales stuff instead).
More recently (2007), I scripted the creation of an Oracle 10g database for an internal system at a megacorp. In production, the database was sized at 8 TB, mostly for a single transaction table with high data volume. In test, the database was sized around 1 TB for a modest server. In development, the database was sized around 100 MB to run on my laptop. The EXACT SAME SCRIPTS created all three environments, and I could extend them to handle a new environment/machine in about five minutes. This database involved extreme performance tuning, so customization of all pertinent characteristics was absolutely crucial.
Back to the insurance claims processing product--let me please add that I was originally hired to lead its conversion from a SQL Server database to an Oracle database. That conversion was identified as a business necessity because most potential clients did not view a SQL-Server-based product as a professional, serious solution. That is not quite as common today, but it still applies in general: a software product has a better chance of market penetration if it can accommodate multiple database options as preferred by the target customers (especially enterprise-class customers).
Likewise, the installation CD was also viewed as an essential element. However, that situation and many more have revealed to me that most "real" DBAs will not accept an import-based database installation. As a DBA and architect, I know that I definitely will not for the same reasons.
Simply put, an import-based database installation gives the customer almost no control over the resulting database. It is opaque to the customer, leaving them questioning what it did. It forces the customer to expend massive efforts to attempt to exercise what little control they can. It is notoriously fragile and error-prone (Oracle imports are well known for ownership and permission problems, constraint problems, etc.). Weighing all those impacts, an import-based database installation is unprofessional--it does not put the customers' needs first.
Scripting the database installation provides the right kind of transparency, configurability, selective repeatability, and overall customer control that professionalism demands. It also encourages you to properly understand the impacts of your database design decisions in a way that an import does not.
Best wishes.
Personally I favour SQL scripts to database creation and data loads where possible. I tend to use PL/SQL Developer. It has some good options to generate scripts from an existing database. Once you have these you can run the scripts using sqlplus or any application code that can execute arbitrary SQL (eg JDBC with Java). Toad is the more common (and more expensive) tool for Oracle development.
The only limitation of a SQL export is it can't export CLOB/BLOB fields. If you have those, you either need to do them separately (as a PL/SQL export) or do the whole thing as a PL/SQL export. Theres no dramas with this except the file is effectively a binary export (extension .pde) and is more limited in how you can execute it.
The other big advantage of SQL source files is they can be version controlled easily. It's really handy to be able to create a database environment by running one or two scripts.
The import and export tools for Oracle I think are more applicable for backup and restore operations.
Now, as for delivering that to a customer, from your comments it seems that you'll be giving this to DBAs. Pretty much any Oracle installation will have DBAs involved. They will be fine with SQL scripts to create the schema and do the data load. They will be doing a lot of site-specific configuration (eg tuning the SGA, temp tablespaces, # of concurrent connections, etc based on expected load).
You, as the vendor, can give guidance on any relevant configuration and you may get involved in support and possibly installation but ultimately it's up to them to figure out what works for them. Oracle runs on a large number of operating systems and hardware variants with infinite variations in network topology and firewall configuraiton. You can't factor in all of these to an installer or even a set of instructions (other than the guidelines mentioned previously).
The last time I was involved in the creation of a (oracle) db (for a reasonably large company with in-house DBAs) the DBAs wanted to know things like:
what we wanted to call the db,
what tablespaces we would need, and an estimate of how much data would be in each one
how many users would be connecting.
(From memory) they set up the db and tablespaces, then we provided a combination of simple scripts that they could run (or clear instructions if a task wasn't easy to automate)
As I say this was for an in-house app, so your mileage may vary, but in my case they wanted all instructions clearly spelt out so that (a) there was no possibily of a misunderstanding leading to the wrong thing being done, and (b) no culpability on their part if something didn't work ("we were just following the instructions")
Sharepoint isn't the speediest of server applications, and I've read about a few tips to speed it up. What steps do you think are necessary to increase performance so it can be used to host a high traffic site?
At the end of the day SharePoint is just a complicated web site with all the standard components.
In order to optimize performance you need to analyze each component and determine which one is a problem, and then adjust it accordingly.
We're in the process of implementing a 1000 concurrent user sharepoint website, which may or may not be large, however some steps we are taking are:
Implementing a detailed caching strategy, to cache webpart content intelligently.
Use load balanced servers to ensure all our hardware is utilised rather then lying idle.
We've undertaken capacity planning given the existing solution, so we have a good idea which component is the bottleneck for us. (The SQL Server), so we will ensure the server can cope with expected load and future growth of the site.
We're also using hardware load balancers which will ensure our network and the related servers operate as expected, and again this is something to investigate before you implement a sharepoint website.
We're also ensuring our webparts don't generate unnecessary html, and don't return unnecesary data, as this will slow down loading times.
Something which I definately think is a good idea is to have a goal to work towards, as you can spend a huge amount of money and time optimizing SharePoint, which may prove unnecessary.
My additional best bets are:
use x64 to allow more RAM on your server
Make the best use of your application pool recycling http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/10/29/sharepoint-app-pool-settings.aspx
Make sure all custom code properly disposes SPWeb and SPSite objects using this http://blogs.msdn.com/rogerla/archive/2008/02/12/sharepoint-2007-and-wss-3-0-dispose-patterns-by-example.aspx
utilize MS Capacity Planning Tool http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb961988.aspx
Plan your site collection and database sizes. Keeping your databases and site collections under control will be key
GOVERNANCE GOVERNANCE GOVERNANCE - Plan for site size limits and expiration strategy. Old data should be deleted or archived for better performance. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb507202.aspx
I cannot emphasize enough that proper early planning is essential for a successful SharePoint implementation.
In addition to caching and hardware, try to make sure that your masterpages and page layouts are not ghosted in the database (requiring a database call to retrieve).
Do this by ensuring the files get released to the 12 hive in your solution.
Don't forget careful selection of the built-in cache settings (choose the right one for your situation).
Use the BLOBCache.
Use IIS Compression/caching (the defaults are not enough BTW).
Ensure your SQL box can keep up, especially during indexing/crawling. Splitting the Application roles (indexing vs search query and dedicated WFE for indexing/crawling) helps.
BTW if you're running VMWare VMs for your WFEs, Windows NLB breaks (though not consistently), so use hardware NLBs or DNS round-robin, etc.
If you don't need > 2gig RAM for the IIS Application Pool on a WFE, don't bother with 64bit on the WFE.
Just my 2c.