We're working on this. Initially when the ajax support was added to dotnetnuke it added a reference at the beginning of the page and then removed it at the end if no loaded module required it (as it needed to be in place when the modules loaded). As this caused a load of the js files , this was changed (I think in 4.7). However, this has led to some concurrency issues so this has been reversed for 4.8.2 (see http://support.dotnetnuke.com/issue/ViewIssue.aspx?id=6862&PROJID=2 ).

Note: the overhead of the files is not as large as you think. If you're not running with debug=true in your web.config the files are only transferred one. Also, you're seeing the expanded size as compression is on by default (seehttp://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.configuration.scriptingscriptresourcehandlersection.enablecompression.aspx )

Cathal