Ajax Control Toolkit causes pages to load slowly

[admol]

I'm developing a c# asp.net 2.0 web application which uses the Ajax Control Toolkit 1.0. However i've noticed that the pages now load very slowly and there is a noticeable delay navigating between pages. The actual ajax controls work flawlessly and are a great addition to the site discounting the load delay. In total there are 12 scripts some of which are on the master page.



Is there some way to speed up the loading of the scripts? Should i avoid putting scripts in the master page or can i use compression and what kind of results should i see?

[Hack]

Should i avoid putting scripts in the master page

That would be where I would start and see what happens.

[admol]

That would be where I would start and see what happens.

The ajax needs to be on each page so that doesn't really solve the problem.

I have narrowed the problem down to the fact that the scripts are loaded before the html content. There is a property LoadScriptsBeforeUI in the script manager but this does not appear to make any difference. I have found an article that implements a hack to load the scripts after the html content but i don't really want to implement this on my web site.

http://weblogs.asp.net/omarzabir/arc...e-content.aspx

Does anyone else have any suggestions?