c# - System.Net.WebClient unreasonably slow

Question

When using the System.Net.WebClient.DownloadData() method I'm getting an unreasonably slow response time.

When fetching an url using the WebClient class in .NET it takes around 10 sec before I get a response, while the same page is fetched by my browser in under 1 sec. And this is with data that's 0.5kB or smaller in size.

The request involves POST/GET parameters and a user agent header if perhaps that could cause problems.

I haven't (yet) tried if other ways to download data in .NET gives me the same problems, but I'm suspecting I might get similar results. (I've always had a feeling web requests in .NET are unusually slow...)

What could be the cause of this?

Edit:
I tried doing the exact thing using System.Net.HttpWebRequest instead, using the following method, and all requests finish in under 1 sec.

public static string DownloadText(string url)
        var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
        var response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

        using (var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
        {
            return reader.ReadToEnd();
        }
}

While this (old) method using System.Net.WebClient takes 15-30s for each request to finish:

public static string DownloadText(string url)
{
       var client = new WebClient();
       byte[] data = client.DownloadData(url);
       return client.Encoding.GetString(data);
}

Answer 1

I had that problem with WebRequest. Try setting Proxy = null;

    WebClient wc = new WebClient();
    wc.Proxy = null;

By default WebClient, WebRequest try to determine what proxy to use from IE settings, sometimes it results in like 5 sec delay before the actual request is sent.

This applies to all classes that use WebRequest, including WCF services with HTTP binding. In general you can use this static code at application startup:

WebRequest.DefaultWebProxy = null;