Often when testing the performance of a ASP.Net website you need to see how the site will perform under extreme conditions. This is easy to do in a virtual environment where you can reduce the number of CPUs or available RAM.

But how do you test this on a physical box?

Vijayshinva Karnure has written a short list of tools that you can use to stress out the CPU, Memory and Disk outside of your ASP.Net application so you can look for memory / timeout / response problems

Check out the list here http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vijaysk/archive/2012/10/27/tools-to-simulate-cpu-memory-disk-load.aspx

A number of these tools come from the Windows SysInternals team who are all about performance

Nick Weinholt (.Net Performance guru and MVP) has an article on the correct method for rethrowing an exception in C# so that the Exception.StackTrace actually points to the root problem.

In C# the correct method for rethowing an exception is using throw; without any arguments within the catch block:

In VB.Net the method is the same:

Using this method the stack trace will go all the way down to the original exception, and not just to your catch block.