On Sep 5, 2013 6:55 PM, "Risker" <risker.wp@gmail.com> wrote:
> Secondly, redirects are expensive - not to those in the Western world with fast computers and high speed internet, but to those who are on dial-up or have comparatively high lag times because of distance (lots of people at Wikimania had difficulty getting good access to Wikipedia during their stay in Hong Kong, for example).  A redirect means that the reader must first load up the "redirect" page and then follow the redirect instruction and wind up on the intended page.  I don't think we pay nearly enough attention to the comparatively poor performance from WMF that our Asian, African, and South American colleagues experience; we're terribly spoiled. 

that's not how redirects work on Wikipedia. (at least for a redirect directly to a page with content… double redirects, i.e. a redirect to a redirect which then points to a real page it is more like how you described. but we have bots and special: pages for fixing double redirects)

we serve a 200 with a little hatnote that says it was a redirect and otherwise serve the same content as if they had visited the canonical name directly. i.e. we don't currently send a 30x to the canonical name and the alternative name remains in the URL in the user's location bar.

the actual timing difference client-side should be smaller than anything a human could detect. (or too small for a computer to notice? idk if anyone's done a study)

-Jeremy