I've got a website that is exhibiting slow performance on the first load and would like to attempt to load it every 5 minutes or so to keep the cache fresh. Are there any simple tools to accomplish this? Scheduled tasks doesn't have quite the time resolution I need. The tricky thing is that this site uses Windows authentication so a wget script won't work. I'm also worried about instantiating a bunch of copies of internet explorer or attempting to kill iexplore.exe tasks blindly.
You haven't said what webserver you're using. If it's current IIS you could try Application WarmUp. If it's something else, you could look for similar server-side tools.
WebInject should do the trick - you can run it from a command line script and it should handle the username / password input.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/115
but I don't know what is the windows authentication and if it works with firefox
Are you sure you're using "windows" authentication rather than just standard http basic auth?
you could try