Found this neat trick in Brendan Gregg's Blazing Performance with Flame Graphs talk.

Switching to LANG=C improved performance by 2000x

In a quick test I directly got a performance gain of factor 50.22.
This is quite an achievement for only changing one environment variable.

real:~# du -sh /var/log/querylog 
148M	/var/log/querylog
real:~# time grep -i e /var/log/querylog > /dev/null 

real	0m12.807s
user	0m12.437s
sys	0m0.068s
real:~# time LANG=C grep -i e /var/log/querylog > /dev/null

real	0m0.255s
user	0m0.196s
sys	0m0.052s

I suspect that the performance gain may vary quite a lot depending on the search pattern. Also, please note that this trick only works when you know that the involved files and search patterns are ASCII only.

(via Standalone Sysadmin)