Occasionally, when I inherit a WordPress project developed by someone else, there is a plugin installed to do redirects. On my own projects, I enter all redirects directly into the .htaccess file.
My question is whether there is a load time issue with the redirect plugins? At some point in the past, I checked the .htaccess file on one of these plugins and noted that the redirects were not in the file. So, I assumed they are stored in the database, resulting in further database calls.
I am also thinking that for redirects in the database to run, WordPress would have to load first. It would seem that loading WordPress before the redirects can run, would result in further load time issues.