I was recently summoned to investigate performance for a bloom filter implementation, requiring to generate quickly 64 pseudo-random bits from small inputs of variable length. XXH64 could fit the bill, but performance on small inputs, never was its priority. It’s not completely wasteful either, it pays a bit attention to short inputs thanks to a small speed module in SMHasher. However, the module itself does the bare minimum, and it was not clear to me what’s exactly measured.

So I decided to create my own benchmark program, as a way to ensure that I understand and control what’s being measured. This was a very interesting journey, leading to surprising discoveries.

The end result of this investigation is XXH3, a cross-over inspired by many other great hash algorithms, which proves substantially faster than existing variants of xxHash, across basically all dimensions. Let’s detail those dimensions, and give some credit where inspiration is due.

source: L