I have a need to run an application in classic mode for backwards compatibility with a specific application, and am trying to understand what kind of impact that will have on the performance of an MVC application that is running on the site.

If we put a few static file maps (for .js, .css, .png, etc) above the ASP.NET wildcard map to reduce the amount of processing by the ASP.NET handler, will we be approaching the integrated mode in terms of performance?

The thing i'm primarily concerned with is any effect this might have on output caching. I understand that integrated mode might (?) allow for the output cache to handle non ASP.NET content, but that isn't really a concern. We're more interested in ensuring that the MVC application has full use of the output cache.

Empirically i've found that the two configurations operate on par when things go well, but if the page references resources that are not available, the integrated mode tends to fail much more quickly than the classic mode (e.g. 500 ms vs 10 seconds), reducing 'hang time' on the page load.

Thanks for any feedback.