Preferred way to do redirects (rewrite or return)

[justin]

What is the preferred way to do redirects? I know of two solutions:

rewrite "^/help/?$" https://support.mydomain.com permanent;

or

location ^/help/?$ {
  return 301 https://support.mydomain.com;
}

I think I like using a location block and a return statement. Which is
faster though and the standard?

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,243075,243075#msg-243075