One comment about 5.2.x and the pcre.backtrack_limit:
Note that this setting wasn't present under previous PHP releases and the behaviour (or limit) under those releases was, in practise, higher so all these PCRE functions were able to "capture" longer strings.
With the arrival of the setting, defaulting to 100000 (less than 100K), you won't be able to match/capture strings over that size using, for example "ungreedy" modifiers.
So, in a lot of situations, you'll need to raise that (very small IMO) limit.
The worst part is that PHP simply won't match/capture those strings over pcre.backtrack_limit and will it be 100% silent about that (I think that throwing some NOTICE/WARNING if raised could help a lot to developers).
There is a lot of people suffering this changed behaviour from I've read on forums, bugs and so on).
Hope this note helps, ciao :-)