Re: digest algorithm performance

[James Youngman]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 02:11:48PM +0200, Jim Meyering wrote:
> address@hidden wrote:
> > I haven't looked too deeply into this,
> > so this is just a heads up.
> 
> Yep.  I mentioned that coreutils/TODO wrt md5sum:
> 
>   Look into improving the performance of md5sum.
>   `openssl md5' is consistently about 30% faster than md5sum on an idle
>   AMD 2000-XP system with plenty of RAM and a 261 MB input file.
>   openssl's md5 implementation is in assembly, generated by a perl script.
> 
> I suspect their sha1 code is similar.
> I'd welcome patches to improve the performance of either.

Putting my work hat on for a second, I would prefer a known correct
and stable implementation that works on many platforms without change
to one that was 50% (say) faster.  However, this is because I'm
working with data that has a very very long lifetime, and so I expect
any code to be used on a range of platforms over the lifetime of the
software.  Other people of course will reasonably have divergent
views.

Regards,
James.