Editing WoW:StringHash/Analysis (section)

== Performance test ==
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This test simply hashes the string "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" in a loop 20 000 times and clocks the start and stop time. The loop is included in the resulting time.

* Java hash execution time: 1.719s
* StringHash execution time: 1.313s


=== Result analysis ===
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StringHash is slightly faster than the Java hash; likely not enough to matter, but certainly enough that the perceived "increased size" of StringHash can be discounted as an argument against it - it's actually faster!

The reason is of course that the math.mod() call is relatively expensive compared to extracting characters from a string and performing multiplications. StringHash does 3 extract + multiply per mod() call. The Java hash in its standard implementation has to do one mod() call per character.


On the testing computer, a P4 at ~3Ghz, StringHash hashes in the neighborhood of half a megabyte per second; certainly not bad for a scripted language using only standard math library operations!


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