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A 301 avoids a database hit, and avoids having to go through the cache framework all together.

It just says given this URL, we return an header that tells the browser to redirect. The only thing faster would be just dropping the connection as soon as its given to you.

Excuse me, Why no 403 or 404?

If I scroll up a bit, I see the reason is:

> redirect the workload to some Chinese government's website and let them suffer what they've created.

If verizon and the like can hold up traffic to/from Netflix... couldn't they just do the same for chinese traffic? Maybe redirect requests for baidu to a chinese version of google?

I'm not saying this is a great idea, just that something could be done.

A 301 is unequivocally less work in every respect.