What's the most efficient way to handle a redirect of the home page? I dont't currently need a home page on the personal site I'm working on but I want to be able to keep the option open in the future. I currently have

{% redirect 'portfolio' %}


as the only code on the index page but Craft seems to take a while before it redirects to the portfolio page.

I tried a rewrite rule and while it worked it doesn't change the URL and I didn't see much difference in the time it took to load the page. In fact, it seemed to take longer on my local machine running MAMP Pro 3 then the redirect tag did.

I also looked into Reroute plug-in by Trevor Davis which seemed to work about as well as the redirect tag, maybe slightly better.

Any thoughts as to which is a better approach and why a simple index page with a redirect tag on it would take so long to process?
.htaccess should always be faster because it doesn't involve PHP or Craft at all.

But on top of that the {% redirect %} tag should be pretty darn quick.

Upon hitting it, Craft immediately calls Yii's CHttpRequest->redirect(), which sets the redirect header and terminates the current request.