hash question

Brian Burton <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.mail.spam.spamprobe.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Asking for opinions: if I switched from a 32 bit hash value as the 
record key to using a 64 bit key or even a digest then I could reduce or 
eliminate the "lossy" nature of the hash format at the expense of a 
larger data file.

If I used a 64 bit hash key the record size would increase from 12 to 16 
bytes (a 33% increase).  Not sure what the loss rate would be with a 64 
bit hash.

If I used a digest (128 bit MD5 hash) the record size would double to 24 
bytes but losses would be virtually eliminated.  Computing an MD5 for 
each term would probably be significantly slower than either 32 or 64 
hash as well.

Thoughts?

++Brian


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