Update on Go 1.1 crypto performance | John Graham-Cumming

Some time ago I integrated OpenSSL's MD5, SHA1 and RC4 functions into Go because Go's native implementations were slow. The Go team has made great strides in fixing this (for 386 and AMD64) with Go 1.1 with faster RC4, SHA1 and MD5.

Rerunning my tester program shows the following:

MD5SHA1RC4Native Go (pre-1.1)404 MB/s123 MB/s111 MB/sVia OpenSSL607 MB/s636 MB/s744 MB/sGo 1.1602 MB/s383 MB/s662 MB/sGo 1.1 vs. OpenSSL0.99x0.6x0.89x
So, the Go team has essentially reached parity with OpenSSL on MD5, is close on RC4, but could still do work to get the SHA1 performance close. (All testing of Go 1.1 was done with 84e21a8c2137 on Ubuntu 12.04 2.4Ghz Intel Core i7; 4 cores with 2GB of RAM).

As a further comparison Go's own benchmark tests shows the following.

MD5, via OpenSSL: BenchmarkHash8K (593 MB/s), BenchmarkHash8KUnaligned (581 MB/s); MD5, Go 1.1: BenchmarkHash8K (584 MB/s), BenchmarkHash8KUnaligned (589 MB/s)

SHA1, via OpenSSL: BenchmarkHash8K (606 MB/s); SHA1, Go 1.1: BenchmarkHash8K (373 MB/s)

RC4, via OpenSSL: BenchmarkRC4_8K (740 MB/s), RC4, Go 1.1: BenchmarkRC4_8K (681 MB/s).

So, that puts Go 1.1 MD5 at parity with OpenSSL, RC4 at around 90% of the speed and SHA1 at around 60%.

PS Reader Luit points to the fact that AES performance has been greatly improved as well: 6x to 7x faster than before on AMD64.