Leading wildcards on certain search terms cause 100% CPU, freezing browser

See the following example: https://jsfiddle.net/8s0dzp2c/22/

Something about the amazon URL being stored in this url field causes the browser to freeze and become unresponsive when searching by a wildcard query.

https://www.amazon.com/ap/signin?_encoding=utf8&openid.assoc_handle=usflex&openid.claimed_id=http%3a%2f%2fspecs.openid.net%2fauth%2f2.0%2fidentifier_select&openid.identity=http%3a%2f%2fspecs.openid.net%2fauth%2f2.0%2fidentifier_select&openid.mode=checkid_setup&openid.ns=http%3a%2f%2fspecs.openid.net%2fauth%2f2.0&openid.ns.pape=http%3a%2f%2fspecs.openid.net%2fextensions%2fpape%2f1.0&openid.pape.max_auth_age=0&openid.return_to=https%3a%2f%2fwww.amazon.com%2f%3fref_%3dnav_custrec_signin

If I trim the URL to something like https://www.amazon.com, there is no issue. See here: https://jsfiddle.net/8s0dzp2c/24/

Also, if I remove the wildcard altogether, it doesn’t freeze anymore.

Is there some character in the URL that is causing things to bug out or something?

[olivernn]

I’ve just published 2.3.3 which includes a fix for this issue. Let me know if it works for you, thanks.

[olivernn]

So, I did a bit of digging and I found this. I cannot remember why it was there in the first place, plus the TODO comment seems to imply that at some point in the past I was also unsure about it. All the current tests pass without it, plus, the particular case you mention in this issue is no longer a problem. The performance for all wildcard matching also improves (slightly) without it.

It seems like removing it should be fine, but I’m a bit cautious. I need to convince myself that it isn’t serving any purpose. I’m going to write some more tests and try and trace through the implementation to try and remember what I was thinking 3 years ago when adding that code!