Tim Bray also posted again on the subject admitting that the test was not a fair comparison of the RE engines (and pointing to the response here on PM). It seems likely that the differences have more to do with Unicode handling in Perl vs. Java. See the article here.

In reply to Re: Java's RegExp Engine Faster Than Perl's? by synistar
in thread Java's RegExp Engine Faster Than Perl's? by YAFZ

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