Almost all the text is ascii, so the branch predictor gets things right. Correctly predicted branches are nearly free, costing about as much as their decode ove

Almost all the text is ascii, so the branch predictor gets things right. Correctly predicted branches are nearly free, costing about as much as their decode overhead. It'd be interesting to see the results where you have randomly shuffled characters of all lengths, although it's likely to be something you see in reality.