When I send/receive data using HttpWebRequest (on Silverlight, using the HTTP POST method) in small blocks, I measure the very small throughput of 500 bytes/s over a "localhost" connection. When sending the data in large blocks, I get 2 MB/s, which is some 5000 times faster.

Does anyone know what could cause this incredibly big overhead?

Update: I did the performance measurement on both Firefox 3.6 and Internet Explorer 7. Both showed similar results.

Update: The Silverlight client-side code I use is essentially my own implementation of the WebClient class. The reason I wrote it is because I noticed the same performance problem with WebClient, and I thought that the HttpWebRequest would allow to tweak the performance issue. Regrettably, this did not work. The implementation is as follows:

public class HttpCommChannel
{
    public delegate void ResponseArrivedCallback(object requestContext, BinaryDataBuffer response);

    public HttpCommChannel(ResponseArrivedCallback responseArrivedCallback)
    {
        this.responseArrivedCallback = responseArrivedCallback;
        this.requestSentEvent = new ManualResetEvent(false);
        this.responseArrivedEvent = new ManualResetEvent(true);
    }

    public void MakeRequest(object requestContext, string url, BinaryDataBuffer requestPacket)
    {
        responseArrivedEvent.WaitOne();
        responseArrivedEvent.Reset();

        this.requestMsg = requestPacket;
        this.requestContext = requestContext;

        this.webRequest = WebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest;
        this.webRequest.AllowReadStreamBuffering = true;
        this.webRequest.ContentType = "text/plain";
        this.webRequest.Method = "POST";

        this.webRequest.BeginGetRequestStream(new AsyncCallback(this.GetRequestStreamCallback), null);
        this.requestSentEvent.WaitOne();
    }

    void GetRequestStreamCallback(IAsyncResult asynchronousResult)
    {
        System.IO.Stream postStream = webRequest.EndGetRequestStream(asynchronousResult);

        postStream.Write(requestMsg.Data, 0, (int)requestMsg.Size);
        postStream.Close();

        requestSentEvent.Set();
        webRequest.BeginGetResponse(new AsyncCallback(this.GetResponseCallback), null);
    }

    void GetResponseCallback(IAsyncResult asynchronousResult)
    {
        HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)webRequest.EndGetResponse(asynchronousResult);
        Stream streamResponse = response.GetResponseStream();
        Dim.Ensure(streamResponse.CanRead);
        byte[] readData = new byte[streamResponse.Length];
        Dim.Ensure(streamResponse.Read(readData, 0, (int)streamResponse.Length) == streamResponse.Length);
        streamResponse.Close();
        response.Close();

        webRequest = null;
        responseArrivedEvent.Set();
        responseArrivedCallback(requestContext, new BinaryDataBuffer(readData));
    }

    HttpWebRequest webRequest;
    ManualResetEvent requestSentEvent;
    BinaryDataBuffer requestMsg;
    object requestContext;
    ManualResetEvent responseArrivedEvent;
    ResponseArrivedCallback responseArrivedCallback;
}

I use this code to send data back and forth to an HTTP server.