Eradicating 401 “Unauthorised” responses followed by 200 “Ok” responses

Question

I’ve got a situation with a large internal corporate web based application running ASP.NET 3.5 on IIS6 generating 401 “Unauthorised” responses followed by 200 “Ok” responses

Answer 1

You may need to consider Forms Authentication if the 401-induced latency is too long. The users would have to explicitly log in, but just once. Then you could use a cookie or cookieless scheme and get a response on the first try.

I imagine that page load would be slow if you have cascading drop-downs and your initial page load populates one value that causes a POST to get the next list, set that value, another POST to get the next list again, and so on. If this is the situation, perhaps you need to populate all those drop-downs on the first round-trip rather than waiting for POST responses.