Best hashing algorithm in terms of hash collisions and performance for strings

Question

What would be the best hashing algorithm if we had the following priorities (in that order):

1. Minimal hash collisions
2. Performance

It doe

Answer 1

"Murmurhash" is pretty good on both performance and collisions.

The mentioned thread at "softwareengineering.stackexchange" has some tests and Murmur wins.

I wrote my own C# port of MurmurHash 2 to .NET and tested it on a list of 466k English words, got 22 collisions.

The results and implementation are here: https://github.com/jitbit/MurmurHash.net (disclaimer, I'm involved with this open source project!)