ASP.NET AJAX Lessons Learned

I used the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Extensions pretty heavily for the user interface of my persistent browser based game Perenthia and after about two weeks of live server testing I have discovered some performance issues that may cause me to abadon the use of the UpdatePanel for straight AJAX calls using JSON objects.

The reason being is that I have UpdatePanels that update various sections of the game and instead of just setting a value as supplied from the server they send back the entire HTML blog of changed text. For orderinary web sites this wouldn't be a problem and in fact when allow them to perform faster. Since Perenthia is a little more interactive in so much as players can move around, which are post backs, and do battle, which are post backs, sending all this HTML back is causing too much bloat.  I am thinking of creating some very simple Javascript objects that I can send down from the server that will contain only values that need to be changed rather than HTML. This way I am not sending down tables, spans and the like.

Anyway, we'll see it how it goes, hopefully it will improve performance of the game because that is lacking right now.