MD5 vs SHA1 in Python
If you are interested to know if the myth about MD5 being faster than SHA1 holds for Python, here is the result I got on my box:
In [1]: import hashlib
In [2]: %timeit hashlib.md5('text text text').hexdigest()
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.29 us per loop
In [3]: %timeit hashlib.sha1('text text text').hexdigest()
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.4 us per loop
Result is: MD5 is faster, but only just, in Python 2.7.2. Considering that MD5 is broken, I think I'll use SHA1…