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Comment by thephyber | Hacker News Reader

There is a tech talk about Bao (I think it’s the same author) where he prefaced the talk by describing a few caveats like “benchmarks are lies” and he mentioned that you should always run a timed process a second time to tease out bias from cached/pages instructions and data.

The core reason this method is faster than traditional SHAs is because Blake3 is a binary tree where the leaf blocks can be hashed in parallel and SHA is entirely sequential

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To be clear, "benchmarks are nothing but lies" is an exaggeration to get my point across. (And a good way to get a laugh at the start of a talk.) But take a look at Figure 3 from the Performance section of the BLAKE3 spec: https://i.imgur.com/smGHAKA.png. Even ignoring things like caching and compiler settings and different hardware, that's a complicated graph! The lines cross all over each other. I count 5 different functions in that graph that are, for at least some input, the "fastest hash function". (I think BLAKE2sp just baaarely passes below BLAKE2bp, just prior to 8 KiB.) It's hard to give a simple summary of a complicated picture. For the big red bar chart at the top of the BLAKE3 repo, we certainly cherry-picked a point where BLAKE3 looks good. But you could also cherry-pick points where it looks bad.

> you should always run a timed process a second time

I should hope that anyone doing benchmarks does them multiple times to avoid crap like popcon or adobe reader update randomly keeping the system busy during one of the two algorithms' benchmarks. I don't expect that the author ran this only once and decided to make a blog post based on that, even if the post doesn't show multiple runs.

Author here, I did run it a few times but you don’t have to take my word for it, you can rerun the notebook yourself if you sign up for Nextjournal and remix my notebook. Full disclosure: I’m also a Cofounder of Nextjournal.

But I wouldn’t suggest to use Nextjournal for serious benchmarking (yet). We’re running on Google Cloud and it’s not suited for benchmarking unless you pay for a (big) sole tenant instance. In the future we plan to offer dedicated instances for benchmarking.

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