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I'm using magneto and I currently have 70,000 URLs are being redirected as 301 (From Catalog >> URL Redirects).
I need to add another 4000 URLs, because every time we run out-of-stock I redirect the product page to the parent category.
With this huge number of URL redirection, can this cause the server to slow down? If yes, what are the alternatives?
Redirects are inexpensive in terms of server resources. They usually require at most a single database query and a few bytes of response. Compare to a a full page render which may require 10s of database queries, transfer significant content, and then need additional server resources for images, CSS, and JavaScript files. You could usually serve hundreds of redirect requests for the same cost as a full page view.
Redirects are also only needed when they are hit. Just because your server knows to respond to a specific URL with a redirect, it doesn't mean that it will get any such requests. When you implement redirects you should update your site to not have the links or to point the links directly to the new location. You will get some requests for old URLs from external links and from search engine spiders checking on old URLs, but the majority of users will never use the redirect functionality.
If you find that some redirects are expensive and often used, that performance problem is easy to solve with caching.
There is no reason to be afraid of implementing lots of redirects for performance reasons.
