Fastest hash for non-cryptographic uses?

John picture John · Sep 8, 2010 · Viewed 87.4k times · Source

I'm essentially preparing phrases to be put into the database, they may be malformed so I want to store a short hash of them instead (I will be simply comparing if they exist or not, so hash is ideal).

I assume MD5 is fairly slow on 100,000+ requests so I wanted to know what would be the best method to hash the phrases, maybe rolling out my own hash function or using hash('md4', '...' would be faster in the end?

I know MySQL has MD5(), so that would complement a bit of speed on the query end, but maybe there's further a faster hashing function in MySQL I don't know about that would work with PHP..

Answer

Quamis picture Quamis · Sep 8, 2010
fcn     time  generated hash
crc32:  0.03163  798740135
md5:    0.0731   0dbab6d0c841278d33be207f14eeab8b
sha1:   0.07331  417a9e5c9ac7c52e32727cfd25da99eca9339a80
xor:    0.65218  119
xor2:   0.29301  134217728
add:    0.57841  1105

And the code used to generate this is:

 $loops = 100000;
 $str = "ana are mere";

 echo "<pre>";

 $tss = microtime(true);
 for($i=0; $i<$loops; $i++){
  $x = crc32($str);
 }
 $tse = microtime(true);
 echo "\ncrc32: \t" . round($tse-$tss, 5) . " \t" . $x;

 $tss = microtime(true);
 for($i=0; $i<$loops; $i++){
  $x = md5($str);
 }
 $tse = microtime(true);
 echo "\nmd5: \t".round($tse-$tss, 5) . " \t" . $x;

 $tss = microtime(true);
 for($i=0; $i<$loops; $i++){
  $x = sha1($str);
 }
 $tse = microtime(true);
 echo "\nsha1: \t".round($tse-$tss, 5) . " \t" . $x;

 $tss = microtime(true);
 for($i=0; $i<$loops; $i++){
  $l = strlen($str);
  $x = 0x77;
  for($j=0;$j<$l;$j++){
   $x = $x xor ord($str[$j]);
  }
 }
 $tse = microtime(true);
 echo "\nxor: \t".round($tse-$tss, 5) . " \t" . $x;

 $tss = microtime(true);
 for($i=0; $i<$loops; $i++){
  $l = strlen($str);
  $x = 0x08;
  for($j=0;$j<$l;$j++){
   $x = ($x<<2) xor $str[$j];
  }
 }
 $tse = microtime(true);
 echo "\nxor2: \t".round($tse-$tss, 5) . " \t" . $x;

 $tss = microtime(true);
 for($i=0; $i<$loops; $i++){
  $l = strlen($str);
  $x = 0;
  for($j=0;$j<$l;$j++){
   $x = $x + ord($str[$j]);
  }
 }
 $tse = microtime(true);
 echo "\nadd: \t".round($tse-$tss, 5) . " \t" . $x;