I've been running two programmes recently, the stressbot and a new program, 'postit' that creates random articles
Each article contains a block of random alphabet soup, just to stress the system. The random characters are chosen from a range of characters, with a weighting on special chars such as '&', '[', '], '<', '>' etc. to stress the parser.
I've just tweaked the program to use characters in the range 32-254, rather than the previous ASCII-only random characters. I've noticed that this seems to speed article posting up a fair bit. The only reason I can think of is that the parser is taking significant CPU time for these pages, and the non-ASCII chars are causing some regexps to terminate early, saving time.
I'll do a couple more tests to try to confirm this.
Neil