I am working on website performance and need a little bit of help determining a slow spot. Below is a snapshot of a typical request to the home page. Obviously I can speed up the SQL a bit, but where can I look to see what took the first step (http://168.62.16.83:80) 168ms?
Does anyone have any advice, or blog post that explains what goes on behind the scenes, and tips on optimizing it? Or is this just the time it took to download all the static content?

The most effective way to find stuff like this is use a traditional profiler like ants, dotTrace or the built in one. (see also)
As to where the time, it is possible you have an expensive spot in
Application_BeginRequestor during authentication.