Re: hashcash-1.15 released

> There is scope to adapt Jonathan's fastmint code directly to make
> compact stamps, just more complicated, so I may make that change in
> future.  I believe Jonathan estimated it should be only around 15%
> slower if done that way, and I think this slow down would be
> acceptable.

Libfastmint should already handle -Z1 stamps as-is, with the ~15% 
penalty (over -Z0) because some optimisations aren't available.

However, -Z2 stamps would still be about 2x slower than -Z1, because 
the primary limitation is the need to hash two SHA1 blocks per try 
instead of one, and I don't plan to support them in libfastmint.  The 
whole point of libfastmint was to gain a minimum 2x improvement over 
the old OpenSSL-heritage code, and -Z1 basically emulates the original 
libfastmint behaviour.

Personally, I simply plan to use -Z0.  :-)  But another good strategy 
for servers might be to use -Z1 normally, and switch to -Z0 in overload 
conditions.

To make life easier for users, how about naming them -turbo, -normal, 
and -compact?  I don't think -normal stamps are visually "too big" for 
most people, so that's another argument against trying to make -compact 
stamps faster.  Especially if it would potentially make -turbo slower.

--------------------------------------------------------------
from:     Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
mail:     [email protected]
website:  http://www.chromatix.uklinux.net/
tagline:  The key to knowledge is not to rely on people to teach you it.