Kirk,
In every postback, we need to transfer whole bunch of json strings to synchronize the states between client and server, this takes some time. Also, the UpdatePanel is just a shortcut for using Ajax in Asp.net. It makes your code much simple and meanwhile it has some performance penalty as it did some extra stuff. There are known issues in our products which might lead to some memory leak, we will try our best to solve it. Also I found when using OpenLayers to manage a big DOM tree, it causes memory leak on client side, that’s another big reason I think.
The better solution is using CallBack, which will most time have better performance than UpdatePanel PostBack. Also, please turn the ClientCache on to avoid reloading same tiles multi times.
If it’s possible, can you send your simple demo to us so we can have a concrete idea how slow it is, as maybe now we are having different understandings on what “slow” means accurately?
Thanks,
Ben