Experienced something similar myself. Was even thinking about creating regular expression library which just allow "safe" and fast expression.
The trick would be to not allow only expression that can be translated easily to state automate.
Good regex: "Phone number [0-9]* "
Bad regex: ";Name=.;" as . can also match ";" and it can lead to bad backtracking. You should rewrite this regex to ";Name=[^;];"
RE2 is probably best implementation so far, but because it's tries so hard to preserve backward compatibility with all regular expression it is not that fast in average case:
https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
The trick would be to not allow only expression that can be translated easily to state automate.
Good regex: "Phone number [0-9]* "
Bad regex: ";Name=.;" as . can also match ";" and it can lead to bad backtracking. You should rewrite this regex to ";Name=[^;];"
RE2 is probably best implementation so far, but because it's tries so hard to preserve backward compatibility with all regular expression it is not that fast in average case: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html