title: ASP.NET Static File Delivery vs ASHX Handler Response.WriteFile
body: <p>I'm tempted to use an <code>.ASHX</code> for image delivery to have pretty Urls <em>(totally legit reason)</em> and monitor access and such. I have other reasons but... I could live with static delivery also.</p>
  
  <p><strong>I'm interested to learn what's the performance penalty of dynamic delivery compared to plain-old static file delivery from someone who's already done it.</strong></p>
  
  <p>I've read <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alikl/archive/2008/05/02/asp-net-performance-sin-serving-images-dynamically-or-another-reason-to-love-fiddler.aspx" rel="nofollow">this post</a> and I'll issue caching headers properly to ensure client side caching.</p>
  
  <p>Aside from this gotcha, how do the two methods stack against each other and should I just stick to static delivery?</p>
  
  <p><strong>PS</strong>: <em>I'm new to ASP.NET so I'm trying to tap into the experience of someone who has already done this. Trying not to learn it the hard way. :)</em></p>