3.6.1. The Choice of a Hash Function

The first hash function I tried to use with GLib's hash was a function that did a 4-byte wide XOR checksum on the data.
The performance of the hash was horrible, much more than anything else I tried.
I then switched to MD5 and so it performed much better.
After some time, I realized MD5 was a relatively slow, cryptologically secure, hash function, and I could find faster functions.
Perl's hash function performed at least equally as well.
Your hash is only as good as your hash function!