[awirth]

Too late to edit, but out of curiosity I re-implemented this to use the PCRE JIT (in PHP) to see what kind of speedup it would provide: https://gist.github.com/allanlw/69df509519335b88db886d48503a...

Timings for fred.cnf on my machine:

python: 0m53.744s

PHP (no PCRE JIT): (hits backtrack limit in 1m15.994s)

PHP (PCRE JIT): 0m20.109s