title: High performance product catalog in asp.net?
body: <p>I am planning a high performance e-commerce project in asp.net and need help in selecting the optimal data retrieval model for the product catalog.</p>
  
  <p>Some details,</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>products in 10-20 categories</li>
  <li>1000-5000 products in every category </li>
  <li>products listed with name, price, brand and image, 15-40 on every page </li>
  <li>products needs to be listed without table-tags </li>
  <li>product info in 2-4 tables that will be joined together (product images not stored in db) </li>
  <li>webserver and sql database on different hardware </li>
  <li>ms sql 2005 on shared db-server (pretty bad performance to start with...) </li>
  <li>enable users to search products combining different criteria such as pricerange, brand, with/without image.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>My questions are, </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>what technique shall I use to retrieve the products? </li>
  <li>what technique shall I use to present the products? </li>
  <li>what cache strategy do you recomend? </li>
  <li>how do I solve filtering, sortering, pageing in the most efficient way? </li>
  <li>do you have any recomendations for more reading on this subject?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance!</p>