[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="http://nanotech.nanotechcorp.net/"
 nickname="NanoTech"
 subject="SHA performance"
 date="2012-08-10T04:37:32Z"
 content="""
It turns out that (at least on x86-64 machines) `SHA512` [is faster than][1] `SHA256`. In some benchmarks I performed<sup>1</sup> `SHA256` was 1.8–2.2x slower than `SHA1` while `SHA512` was only 1.5–1.6x slower.

`SHA224` and `SHA384` are effectively just truncated versions of `SHA256` and `SHA512` so their performance characteristics are identical.

[1]: https://community.emc.com/community/edn/rsashare/blog/2010/11/01/sha-2-algorithms-when-sha-512-is-more-secure-and-faster
<sup>1</sup> `time head -c 100000000 /dev/zero | shasum -a 512`
"""]]