Q:

Regex operation cost

So bottom line, speed REALLY matters to me. Every millisecond, so I want to see which method is the fastest.
I'm my program, I have various cases with different flags (flag[1] - flag[7]). To see how to handle the output, I must match the input with one of various patterns (pattern[1] - pattern[7]). So here is the question, is it better match the string with pattern[1], if it matches, handle it, if not try to match it to pattern[2] (pretty much doing the matching 7 times) OR to put ALL patterns into one regex with a split like:
"^[patterns[1]|pattern[2]|...]$

see if matches, and if it does, do a split on the string to get the flag value (it is always in the end) and handle it accordingly?
So bottom line: 7 different matches against 1 match and a split.
Note: based on the provided data, I will attempt to sort the 7 matches, so the one that is most likely to occur will be matched first. 
I want to keep this question time-oriented, but for suggestions and decision making, the probability of the string being accepted after first match is roughly 91.3%

A:

I got 24783 entry file to test the results.
When using 7 different regexes, I ran it through and got 0.1932ish seconds for the first run and 0.14-0.16 for all consecutive runs (Regex compile time).
When using just 1 Regex (mashed all 7 regexes into 1), I got 0.262 for the first compile and 0.18-0.21 for consecutive runs.
Maybe because the regex that I ran first covered most of it (as mentioned before, it used like 91.3% of the cases), the mashed regex did perform quite well. 
I did extra operations and found that I still have to split the string afterwards for processing purposes, so it all came down to 7 regexes in if-else statements vs. 1 huge Regex. 
End test on 24k sample - roughly 0.05 second difference.

