FYI, Unladen Swallow includes several regex benchmark suites: a port of 
V8's regex benchmarks (regex_v8); some of the regexes used when tuning 
the existing sre engine 7-8 years ago (regex_effbot); and a 
regex_compile benchmark that tests regex compilation time.

See http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/Benchmarks for more 
details, including how to check out and run the benchmark suite. You'll 
need to modify your experimental Python build to have "import re" import 
the proposed regex engine, rather than _sre. The benchmark command would 
look something like `./perf.py -r -b regex /control/python 
/experiment/python`, which will run all the regex benchmarks in rigorous 
mode. I'll be happy to answer any questions you have about our 
benchmarks.

I'd be very interested to see how the proposed regex engine performs on 
these tests.