This depends on the implementation of the regex engine; most are potentially superlinear in time, since that’s the easiest way of doing it, and quite fast until

This depends on the implementation of the regex engine; most are potentially superlinear in time, since that’s the easiest way of doing it, and quite fast until suddenly it isn’t. I always check the algorithm being used before I use regular expressions in production. I was surprised how many use a recursive descent strategy! (Also, BTW, you can deal with the exponential space issue by using an NFA instead of a DFA – it’s slower that way, but the memory space required is reliably linearly proportional to the size of the regex.)