The webresource.axd is an extension for ASP.NET and is used to serve up embedded resources.  This could be anything from an Image to a Javascript file to an XSLT file.  In general, these files will be cached by the client upon viewing the page the first time, which means on ensuing requests the file client does not not need to download the resource over again. 

With the files cached, a pefromance focus should be on the initial page load (for first time viewers).  As was suggested earlier, turning on gzip compression is a great way to reduce page size.  Because javascript is a plain text interpreted language, the files normally have a great deal of white space which can benefit from compression.  However, compression must be done at the webserver level, and cannot be done by Infragistics or the components themselves. 

I'm sure you probably already know this, but one last item to watch out for is ViewState.  In most cases, you don't need viewstate turned on - and the NetAdvantage for ASP.NET controls can function fine without viewstate.  If you can go without it, turning off viewstate is a great way to total page size.

As with everything in programming, there are tradeoffs.  Elevating a WebApplication to the next level by providing a rich user experience comes with a cost, namely the size of the libraries on which it builds; whether you're using ASP.NET AJAX libraries, or NetAdvantage For ASP.NET, or Silverlight.  What we aim to do moving forward is limit the "price" you pay to the features your using.  By trimming down the script to only that required to support the set of features you enabled in a given component, we hope to bring the baseline download even further down.  We also plan on doing some whitespace removal as well as some simple 'compression' of the script files which will make them less readable but much friendlier across the wire. 

Thank you for taking the time to list your concerns, and I hope you'll continue to give us feedback on the new list of controls and the direction we are taking.  I'm really interested in hearing how these controls fare in your environment.

Thanks,

-Tony

I have to ask the question....

Is IG Netadvantage for ASP.NET really suitable for a Shared Hosting Environment or any internet based deployment?

I was using 2007 vol 2, but I had to pull everything apart from the Charts.  Page sizes which were all less than 40K started exceeding 200k mainly ig code files such as webresource.axd.

Now usually most of my page size is taken up with images, but this much code per page has been and always will be totally unacceptable. Whole operating systems have been written with less code.

I can accept a 30% to 50% size overhead when using something like NetAdvantage, but 300% to 500% you must be joking!

Please do keep files sizes and numbers to a minimum. I've experienced Anatoly's problem first hand. I was in Tel Aviv earlier this year and was showing one our applications to our customer and it was slow. The vast majority of my customers are accessing my sites from overseas so keeping things as lean and fast is a high priority for me.