Regexp search is slower. SQLite's support for regexp comes from an external library (sqlite3-pcre) that most of the time isn't installed on the host system. Even when it is, it doesn't always work.

My solution around this, is, when regexp is enabled, to query for all the history and then have Go perform the regexp search itself —the normal is to let SQLite perform the search.

Depending on your CPU and history size, you may need a couple seconds for the result. For example when the server process runs on an Atom processor and the history is about 150.000 lines long, a regexp search takes about 7 seconds. A normal search with a wildcard on the same machine and history database, needs only 1 second.