I have found an interesting post on  Mads Kristensen's blog regarding the optimization of ASP.NET sites. It seems that ASP.NET has an outgoing connection limit which is set to 2 connections by default. So the ASP.NET process does not create more than 2 concurrent connections simultaneously, but instead queues them up.

In order to increase the number of connections, the followings have to be added to the web.config:

<system.net>
  <connectionManagement>
     <add address="*" maxconnection="8"/>
  </connectionManagement>
</system.net>

We have implemented this on Blocks4.NET and indeed it seems to load a little bit faster. This will probably produce an increase in the CPU usage on the server. I wonder if the hosting company gives us a friendly warning ... 

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It seems that this is needed only for ASP.NET 1.1 and not for ASP.NET 2.0. In ASP.NET 2.0 you no longer need to configure maxConnection manually as it is now automatically scaled and set. This is a result of the new configuration section for the processModel tag in machine.config.

More details: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/11/InsideMSCOM/