I just noticed a problem I have with the latest release version, under it my large table returns a "Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /var/www/html/dokuwiki_dev/dokuwiki-2005-02-18/inc/utf8.php on line 194" on my fairly slow server but under the older versions (2004-11-02 for example) it worked OK. On your server I pasted it into the playground as
http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:playground:largetable - it works there but perhaps that is just the difference between my pentium 667 server and your one !. I am using a Fedora Linux, Apache combination on my "in house" server. I notice you are talking about improving the parsing engine which may fix this anyway but just thought I would mention it.