Ruby MD5 and SHA1 Digest Benchmark

November 17, 2009 | Tags:

I did a benchmark of MD5 and SHA1 digests in Ruby. The benchmark was done in Ruby 1.8.6 on Windows.

The code used to benchmark:

require 'benchmark'
require 'digest/sha1'
require 'digest/md5'
require 'base64'

# Demonstration of digests

puts "SHA1.hexdigest     #{Digest::SHA1.hexdigest('test')}"
puts "MD5.hexdigest      #{Digest::MD5.hexdigest('test')}"
puts "SHA1.digest        #{Base64.encode64(Digest::SHA1.digest('test'))}"
puts "MD5.digest         #{Base64.encode64(Digest::MD5.digest('test'))}"
puts "MD5.digest.inspect #{Digest::MD5.digest('test').inspect}"

print "\nSHA1.digest bytes "
Digest::SHA1.digest('test').each_byte {|c| printf("%4d", c) }
print "\nMD5.digest bytes  "
Digest::MD5.digest( 'test').each_byte {|c| printf("%4d", c) }
puts "\n\n"

# Benchmark

TIMES = 50_000

Benchmark.bmbm do |b|
b.report("sha1 hexdig") { TIMES.times do |x|; Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(x.to_s); end }
b.report("md5  hexdig") { TIMES.times do |x|; Digest::MD5.hexdigest(x.to_s); end }

b.report("sha1 digest") { TIMES.times do |x|; Digest::SHA1.digest(x.to_s); end }
b.report("md5  digest") { TIMES.times do |x|; Digest::MD5.digest(x.to_s); end }
end

The output:

SHA1.hexdigest     a94a8fe5ccb19ba61c4c0873d391e987982fbbd3
MD5.hexdigest      098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6
SHA1.digest        qUqP5cyxm6YcTAhz05Hph5gvu9M=
MD5.digest         CY9rzUYh03PK3k6DJie09g==
MD5.digest.inspect "\t\217k\315F!\323s\312\336N\203&amp;amp;amp;'\264\366"

SHA1.digest bytes  169  74 143 229 204 177 155 166  28  76   8 115 211 145 233 135 152  47 187 211
MD5.digest bytes     9 143 107 205  70  33 211 115 202 222  78 131  38  39 180 246

Rehearsal -----------------------------------------------
sha1 hexdig   0.797000   0.000000   0.797000 (  0.796000)
md5  hexdig   0.641000   0.000000   0.641000 (  0.641000)
sha1 digest   0.625000   0.000000   0.625000 (  0.625000)
md5  digest   0.500000   0.000000   0.500000 (  0.500000)
-------------------------------------- total: 2.563000sec

user     system      total        real
sha1 hexdig   0.750000   0.032000   0.782000 (  0.781000)
md5  hexdig   0.593000   0.000000   0.593000 (  0.594000)
sha1 digest   0.594000   0.031000   0.625000 (  0.625000)
md5  digest   0.469000   0.000000   0.469000 (  0.468000)

As expected, digest methods are faster than hexdigest and MD5 is faster than SHA1.

Andrew Rollins

Ruby MD5 and SHA1 Digest Benchmark