Prevent IIS from serving static files through ASP.NET pipeline

asp.net-mvc forms-authentication iis-7.5 static-files
kenwarner picture kenwarner · Jun 8, 2011 · Viewed 18.2k times · Source

Requests for my css, js, image files are being served through the ASP.NET pipeline. I thought IIS by default avoided this, but I see the requests on my Application_AuthenticateRequest breakpoint and there's no need to actually authenticate those requests. I've seen conflicting approaches to change this behavior - What is the best way to do this?

Answer

Kev picture Kev · Jun 9, 2011

I'm taking a guess here and suspect that you have the following setting configured in your web.config file:

<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">

This means that every request, including those for static content is hitting the pipeline.

Change this setting to:

<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="false">

This is assuming your application is running under ASP.NET 4.0 and MVC3.

For this to work you need to install KB980368 (requires a reboot) or Windows 2008R2 SP1 (which includes this hotfix). The reason for this is explained in this excellent article:

How ASP.NET MVC Routing Works and its Impact on the Performance of Static Requests

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