I'm updating a WP theme, changing permalinks, and also migrating to https at same time. Have 1 wildcard redirect (removing categories from URL) and about 140 manual redirects (old joomla links). Need advice between going with htaccess or Safe Redirect Manager. My only concern is page load speed, not extensible features or tracking.
It would seem like htaccess would always be the fastest but my htaccess file is 20kb (because of all the manual redirects). And so I wonder if loading a php plugin on every request (however all redirects intelligently cached) is faster. SRM might seem like the better option considering all the manual redirects but I'm wondering if there are some old-school htaccess phreaks who might say otherwise. I don't want to go through the hassle of testing.
The best solution would probably be to put your redirects in the main Apache config. Then this is only processed once when the server is started, rather than a 20kb htaccess being parsed for every request. As for your other option, not sure on the performance impact.