Ajax Bandwidth Overhead

Although Ajax reduces the postback size for ASP.NET applications, it does have a little drawback. Ajax rely on a suite of javascript library to perform its magic. Those javascript files such as ScriptResource.axd and WebResource.axd needs to be downloaded to the client browser. First I would thought, web browsers would cache these files. So the users would only need to download these files once only, right? A close inspection to the requests sent to the servers for these files show that they were requested with query strings at the back e.g. .../WebResource.axd?d=2KPNGySHzRkl024_lWT1Qg2&t=633052587689473359. Usually browsers will not cache such files. The more Ajax features you implement into your ASP.NET application, more js files need to be downloaded. However, the size of these javascript files can be reduced by:

1. Ensure debug mode is set to off in the web.config. For my case, the reduction of the *.axd files went from over 300+kb to 128kb. That's 60% size reduction.
2. Making use of IIS compression. Although I suspect this wouldn't help much.

Therefore, one should consider this size factor when implementing Ajax into their web application. Some similar functionalities still can be achieved without using Ajax.