If you've really got all your ducks in a row, your URIs will be short to begin with. You'll have followed the suggestions made back in the early 90s that URIs should be concise and never change. Planning for that type of scalability is a bit challenging and definitely has its long term rewards.
A simple module could check for integer in the first part of the argument and send to the node ID for a very simple way of shortening URLs on a Drupal site.
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