This is an issue of good Perl and bad Perl

You are correct. .*? is perhaps one of the least efficient singular regex constructs available. Why are you matching text you are not keeping, anyways? Are you unaware that there is an entirely separate construct (s/whatever//) made for removing text?

Have you not read the extensive perlre documentation for the product that you are using? Just because something is free doesn't mean that you automatically know how to use it right-out-of-the-box.

Also, if IBM had written Perl, it would probably take over a minute to start while it loaded its built in WSADIE plugins for J2EE development.