Posting doesn’t always end in redirect?

I’m still on my ‘outdated’ codebase, but have noticed it takes a lot of time to post my new articles — I’m assuming it’s the blog pings or something taking the time — and in many cases it ‘finishes’ but leaves me on the post screen and doesn’t redirect me to a ‘clean’ screen. Anyone seen this before? Timeout occurring somewhere low-level?
While I’m at it, since posting/editing takes many, many seconds at the moment, I’m thinking about tweaking the Edit page interface to have ‘quick buttons’ for changing posts between Publish and Sticky status. Anyone mucked with that admin page like that, before I go learning how to break things better? ??
Thanks!
-d