Actually, you are tackling it the opposite way.
It is true that doing hash(salt + password)
would allow you to precompute the salt (but see note below) and only hash each password candidate for all those trials. The cost be the same you would bear if you were not using a salt at all.
However, the goal of the salt is not to make bruteforcing a single hash harder, but to ensure that the hashes for different users are different even if they chose the same password and so the cracking effort can't be applied for multiple users.
Let's assume you dumped a PayPal database hashes where they were using MD5 hashes. You want to check passwords 'paypal', 'PayPal', 'PayPal123'...
If they used MD5(password), you can trivially hash any of them and find out if anyone is using such weak password.
If they used MD5(salt + password), you could precompute the partial MD5(salt) for everyone, but still need to hash each password candidate for each user.
If they used MD5(password + salt), you could precompute the partial MD5(password) for each candidate password, and then apply their salt for each user.
#1 is clearly the worst here. You could argue between #2 and #3 based on the different lengths of passwords and salts, as well as the number of users, but I would consider #2 to be preferable. Based on length alone, the enforced minimum length for your passwords is probably higher than the salt size. But I suspect there could be other weakness with the #3 construct, too.
Is it a significant advantage?
Not really.
First of all, many hash functions work in blocks, and the precomputation for values smaller than the block size simply store a copy of the "precomputed bytes". In 99% of the cases the length of both salt and password will be shorter than the block size, so actually there would be no real precomputation being performed. You would need to be using really long strings there for that to be of use.
Additionally, any modern password hash function will at the very minimum use many iterations, if not using more advanced means to make bruteforcing expensive, and your optimization is only applicable the initial iteration.
In any case, rather than simply concatenating salt and password, the most secure way to combine them would be to do an HMAC over them, which mixes them in a better way.