This file is a part of a WordPress plugin with a user base of 10k users and growing. The regular expressions are OSINT sourced. Having developed this solution and with a decent user-base, sadly my options at this moment are limited. This will be ported to other CMSes too.
At the moment I've chosen to use curl to post the payload to a url endpoint which in the worst case will timeout thereby allowing PHP to handle the exception and recover / continue. This is essentially the same as spawning an external process to let PHP be an observer than indulge itself into something that it cannot handle.
I do sincerely appreciate everyone's inputs. Learned quite a few things and potentially alternate approaches. Thanks again.
