For the sake of brevity, I cut out my "payload" and just counted lines. I counted lines just to benchmark the regex times.
My rationale was something like this:
"find a line that starts with a date, capture all of the text (including new lines) until I can lookahead and find another date."
as originally written your regex would miss the last log entry, because it fails the positive lookahead assertion
You are correct - definately an unintended consequence. Since a log file entry could span multiple lines I was using the lookahead to in effect say "stop capturing when you can see the next log file entry"
The sample data I included in the original script probably should have included some of the more complex, multi-line log file entries.