Hi Chad,

First, I don't know anything about Plumtree Portal, but I do know a bit
about .NET and its performance characteristics.

The first thing to check is the machine.config of the server. Make sure you
have tuned your ASP.NET server to handle the load level you have.  You will
need to check things such as the thread pool size and memory allocation.

Next, if you are using SQL Server, open the profiler and see what is taking
so long.  Chances are you have lots of queries open that are long-running and
hence are clogging up the usable threads on the ASP.NET server.  If you open
the management node from the MMC and count the number of open connections to
the server, you will get a feel for the load on the SQL server.  Hopefully
the Plumtree Portal is using connection pooling, and is disposing of its
connections gracefully.

After you've tweaked the machine.config and looked at SQL Server (or Oracle
if that's your system), then contact Plumtree about their portal software.  
Maybe they have some software issues that need to be fixed.

If you open the web.config file in the Plumtree web folder, you can tweak
their connection pooling strategy as well.

Hope that helps.

-- Jake