If you want performance on AAA alkaline, I can recommend the Ultrafire M5, it is small, it burns through your battery quickly with lousy efficiency, but it has one of the best outputs on alkalines I know of (1 mode though).
If you want performance on 10440 (Efest IMR recommended), again the Ultrafire M5 (360lumen OTF), I did a small review on it the other day, that is why I know. If you are into modding you can put in a XP-G2 led on a copper board and completely bypass the driver: connect the led directly to the battery, it will improve output even further. The M5 has (for such a small light) a fairly good heatpath to the body of the light, so it will handle the high current well.
There are some reported reliability issues with the M5, but I did not encounter them.