Draco got it, sorry I thought it would be obvious what I was referring too. I'm now about 5x faster then before the optimization and I'm running 500 test paths in the suite in roughly the same time it took to do 100 when I started.
The problem is it's unknown what the equivalent speed in DF would be, I suspect were still a good deal slower because theirs are a few layers of indirection necessary to retrieve the Connections and Edge Costs from the Grid. This has to be their because were going to use a Client/Server structure ware as DF probably integrates all this into the map structure and thus has less indirection. So even fully optimized I don't think the simple AStar will be equal to DF, but the Hierarchical solution will be and the Cache on top of that will be another gain so by the end we could be looking at an order of magnitude better performance.
.01 ms...10000 cycles per tile?
Remember this is per tile in the FINAL PATH, as you can see on the output were expanding ~18 nodes per path tile and examining the graph ~70 times, this is actually rather good considering what something like Dijikstra's algorithm would do. I'm testing on a map with a relatively large and complex fort which is generating plenty of dead ends and maze like structures for the Pathfinder to get lost in.
UPDATE:
Got the performance down to 0.19 by using an Object Pool, I think is as good as it will get without using real profiling tools which I'm not experienced with. I'm going to move towards the Hierarchical approaches and to create a path Corridor through which to run a slightly modified AStar through, this should reduce the nodes being expanded to make things faster.