[Haskell-cafe] Performance: MD5

[Andrew Coppin]

Salvatore Insalaco wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
> just a profiling suggestion: did you try to use the SCC cost-centre
> annotations for profiling?
> If you want to know precisely what takes 60% of time, you can try:
>         bn = {-# SCC "IntegerConversion" #-} 4 * fromIntegral wn
>         b0 = {-# SCC "ByteStringIndexing" #-} B.index bi (bn+0)
>         b1 = {-# SCC "ByteStringIndexing" #-} B.index bi (bn+1)
>         b2 = {-# SCC "ByteStringIndexing" #-} B.index bi (bn+2)
>         b3 = {-# SCC "ByteStringIndexing" #-} B.index bi (bn+3)
>         w  = foldl' (\w b -> shiftL w 8 .|. fromIntegral b) 0 [b3,b2,b1,b0]
>       in {-# SCC "ArrayWriting" #-} unsafeWrite temp wn w
>
> In profiling the time of all expressions with the same SCC "name" will
> be summed.
> You can get more information about SCC here:
> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/profiling.html#cost-centres
>   

OK, I'll give that a try...

> One advice: I've seen various md5sum implementations in C, all using
> about the same algorithms and data structures, and they performed even
> with 10x time differences between them; md5summing fast is not a
> really simple problem. If I were you I would drop the comparison with
> ultra-optimized C and concentrate on "does my
> high-level-good-looking-super-readable implementation perform
> acceptably?".
>
> What "acceptably" means is left as an exercise to the reader.
>   

Well, so long as it can hash 500 MB of data in a few minutes without 
using absurd amounts of RAM, that'll do for me. ;-)

[I actually wanted to do this for a project at work. When I discovered 
that none of the available Haskell implementations are fast enough, I 
tried to write my own. But that wasn't fast enough either. So I ended up 
being forced to call md5sum.exe and attempt to parse its output. 
Obviously having a real Haskell function would be infinitely more 
portable and convinient...]