Fast implementation of MD5 in C++

Question

First of all, to be clear, I'm aware that a huge number of MD5 implementations exist in C++. The problem here is I'm wondering if there is a comparison of which implementation is faster than the others. Since I'm using this MD5 hash function on files with size larger than 10GB, speed indeed is a major concern here.

Answer 1

I think the point avakar is trying to make is: with modern processing power the IO speed of your hard drive is the bottleneck not the calculation of the hash. Getting a more efficient algorithm will not help you as that is not (likely) the slowest point.

If you are doing anything special (1000's of rounds for example) then it may be different, but if you are just calculating a hash of a file. You need to speed up your IO, not your math.