Reducing roundtrips to the server/database

Question

When writing ASP.NET pages, what signs do you look for that your page is making too many roundtrips to a database or server?

(This is a general question but I say ASP.NET as the majority of my coding is on the web side of things).

Answer 1

How much is too much? The €1M question! Profile. Then profile. If your app is spending most of its time doing data access, you have a problem (and should look at a sql trace). If it is spending most of its time drawing the UI, then (assuming your view isn't doing data access) you should probably look elsewhere first...