Summary
In WT-8366 we allow the use of numerical values rather than strings when passing timestamps into WiredTiger API calls.  This change provided 15+% performance improvements on Intel and larger benefits on ARM.  

Are there other places we could make similar changes and also achieve good speedups?  Cursor creation is another frequent operation, but perhaps any performance issues there are already addressed by the WiredTiger cursor cache.  

In a hallway conversation, geert.bosch@mongodb.com said that one reason for the MongoDB-level cursor cache is avoid config string parsing. So maybe there is a way make similar optimizations in cursor creation and eliminate the need for two levels of cursor caching?

The goal of this ticket is to provide a forum to collect the knowledge of the folks who implemented cursors and cursor caching (donald.anderson@mongodb.com and agorrod come to mind) and, if desirable, to collect and analyze supporting data.  Depending on the conclusion we can create follow-on tickets for any work that is identified.