MD5 vs SHA-1 vs SHA-256 performance

I was curious this weekend about how MD5 vs SHA-1 vs SHA-256 performance stacks up.  If you have the OpenSSL libraries installed, you can run a short test to calculate performance on your CPU.  It gives ballpark estimates, which may or may not carry over to real-world performance on actual file data.

$ openssl speed md5 sha1 sha256

Estimates/Summary:

SHA-1 is about 55-75% the speed of MD5
SHA-256 is about 25-40% the speed of MD5
SHA-256 is about 50-60% the speed of SHA-1

Whether or not you will be CPU-bound in computing the file hashes will depend on where you are reading the files from.  Over gigabit LAN or from older mechanical hard drives, or external USB2/USB3 drives, most modern CPUs can keep up even with SHA-256.  But if you are reading the files off of a local SSD or really fast mechanical drive (or RAID) then you are likely to be bottlenecked by the CPU.

Details (openssl test):

AMD Opteron 2210 HE @ 1.8GHz
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
md5              25350.32k    80336.17k   191208.72k   295806.29k   353239.04k
sha1             27497.51k    77933.74k   168168.28k   235850.41k   268205.53k
sha256           22543.94k    51445.66k    88818.90k   108275.37k   116416.81k

AMD Opteron 6212 @ 2.6GHz
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
md5              45318.86k   134308.27k   324486.83k   493194.58k   582216.36k
sha1             47027.79k   128927.42k   278593.02k   410244.44k   471425.02k
sha256           28690.18k    62662.12k   106333.61k   127998.98k   136325.80k

AMD Opteron 1214 @ 2.2GHz
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
md5              30417.85k    96951.65k   235868.24k   361845.33k   433094.16k
sha1             34126.39k    98072.04k   208456.70k   291041.35k   328654.85k
sha256           27362.92k    63127.50k   108537.35k   132564.38k   142727.86k

AMD Opteron 4180 @ 2.6GHz
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
md5              43180.73k   129437.27k   298339.15k   442248.19k   519602.18k
sha1             45699.96k   123160.41k   255322.20k   347329.88k   390250.50k
sha256           33757.18k    75191.85k   128929.37k   157659.82k   168790.70k

Intel Xeon E5520 @ 2.27GHz
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
md5              25945.50k    88897.43k   220292.01k   354356.91k   430339.41k
sha1             26568.69k    78716.78k   174506.35k   251495.08k   288858.11k
sha256           20495.77k    49206.73k    90735.59k   114904.75k   124605.78k

AMD Phenom II X4 810 @ 2.6GHz
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
md5              42430.27k   130101.07k   301091.11k   444996.84k   522918.05k
sha1             46015.86k   125298.40k   256391.07k   349968.95k   393227.03k
sha256           34432.84k    76378.03k   130828.67k   158859.76k   168782.78k

Additional tests/experiments:

Tests using "(sha256|sha1|md5)sum" programs on Opteron 4180 w/ SSDs, using 133GB of large files.  The CPU core assigned to the task was pegged at 100% utilization according to "atop".  The SSD used has an estimated top speed of 490 MB/s.

MD5: ~318 MiB/s (428 sec)
SHA-1: ~187 MiB/s (729 sec) - 1.7x slower then MD5
SHA-256: ~113 MiB/s (1204 sec) - 2.8x slower then MD5, 1.65x slower then SHA-1