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Comment by clarkmoody | Hacker News Reader

Another benchmark:

time openssl sha256 /tmp/bigfile

  real  0m28.160s
  user  0m27.750s
  sys   0m0.272s

time shasum -a 256 /tmp/bigfile

  real  0m6.146s
  user  0m5.407s
  sys   0m0.560s

time b2sum /tmp/bigfile

  real  0m1.732s
  user  0m1.450s
  sys   0m0.244s

time b3sum /tmp/bigfile

  real  0m0.212s
  user  0m0.996s
  sys   0m0.379s

TIL OpenSSL sha256 invocation is really slow compared to the shasum program. Also BLAKE3 is really fast.

Edit: bigfile is 1GB of /dev/random

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May be silly to ask, but can we assume the numbers are from second run for each variant.

Here's my similar runs on a E3-1230 v5:

   b3sum     ./1GB 0m0.124s
   md5sum    ./1GB 0m1.620s
   sha512sum ./1GB 0m2.988s
   sha256sum ./1GB 0m4.738s

I was even more impressed when I timed dd:

   $ time dd if=./1GB of=/dev/null bs=65536
   16384+0 records in
   16384+0 records out
   1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 0.10451 s, 10.3 GB/s

   real 0m0.107s

Did you prime the cache before the first run? Or put /temp on a RAM file system?

On my machine running Ubuntu 18.04 (coreutils 8.28, openssl 1.1.1), openssl is faster than both shasum and sha256sum.

Yeah as someone familiar with openssl it looks like a version of openssl that was built incorrectly.

Some notes re coreutils and ssh

sha256sum uses 128KiB blocks when reading, which may be more optimized than the openssl program.

sha256sum supports using openssl libs as they are generally faster. This is enabled on Red Hat flavored distros and arch, but not debian flavored as yet

The upcoming release of sha256sum (8.32) will auto enable use of openssl for >= v 3, as openssl's licence has changed to apache in that version

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