How does non-capturing groups affect performance or memory usage?

Non-capturing groups in regular expressions provide a way to group patterns without creating backreferences. This can enhance performance and reduce memory usage, especially in complex regex patterns where capturing groups are unnecessary.

When a capturing group matches a substring, the regex engine keeps track of it for potential use later (like in replacements). Non-capturing groups, on the other hand, do not store this information. Therefore, using non-capturing groups reduces the overhead of managing stored matches, which can lead to improved speed and lower memory consumption, particularly in larger text or when using many groups.