There's an issue with HttpWebRequest, in some environments (misconfigured environments?), the first request on a HttpWebRequest instance takes disproportional long, up to 30 and more seconds.

The problem seems to be the automatic proxy detection that HttpWebRequest implicitly does.

I attached a patch that completely disables the proxy detection (sets the HttpWebRequest.Proxy property to NULL). This does the trick and the first request doesn't take longer than any other request anymore.

Hope someone saves some time with this :)

Best Regards, André