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Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

I can replicate this behavior fairly easily in a browser.

  1. Open incognito window in Chrome
  2. Visit https://t.co/4fs609qwWt -> 5s delay
  3. Open a second tab in the same window -> no delay
  4. Close window, start a new incognito session
  5. Visit https://t.co/4fs609qwWt -> 5s delay returns

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The reason there isn't a delay the second click is because the redirect is cached locally in your browser.

Your humble anonymous tipster would appreciate if you do a little legwork.

> The reason there isn't a delay the second click is because the redirect is cached locally in your browser.

No, because it’s not an HTTP redirect. It’s an HTML page that redirects you using a meta tag, something that the browser doesn’t cache.

Your humble anonymous tipster notes to their skeptical audience that browsers are capable of caching all sorts of things, even something as peculiar as an HTML page.

> browsers are capable of caching all sorts of things, even something as peculiar as an HTML page.

Yes, and this is irrelevant to your previous comment: caching the HTML doesn’t cache the redirect itself.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. The delay was not on the HTML page.

> The delay was not on the HTML page.

Nobody is saying that.

What is that attempting to prove or replicate?

Here's a simpler test I think replicates what I am indicating in GP comment, with regards to cookie handling:

Not passing a cookie to the next stage; pure GET request:

    $ time curl -s -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0" -e ";auto" -L https://t.co/4fs609qwWt > nocookie.html

    real    0m4.916s
    user    0m0.016s
    sys     0m0.018s

Using `-b` to pass the cookies _(same command as above, just adding `-b`)_

    $ time curl -s -b -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0" -e ";auto" -L https://t.co/4fs609qwWt > withcookie.html

    real    0m1.995s
    user    0m0.083s
    sys     0m0.026s

Look at the differences in the resulting files for 'with' and 'no' cookie. One redirect works in a timely manner. The other takes the ~4-5 seconds to redirect.

In your second example you are passing the cookie file named ./-A then trying to GET the URL "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0" followed by https://t.co/4fs609qwWt

You're completely missing the point, which is that the 5 second delay doesn't exist at all for most t.co links, even without cookies. The delay only exists for a few Musk-hated domains.

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