On Sep 5, 2013 6:55 PM, "Risker" <risker.wp(a)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