What's the best hashing algorithm to use on a stl string when using hash_map?

Question

I\'ve found the standard hashing function on VS2005 is painfully slow when trying to achieve high performance look ups. What are some good examples of fast and efficient has

Answer 1

If your strings are on average longer than a single cache line, but their length+prefix are reasonably unique, consider hasing just the length+first 8/16 characters. (The length is contained in the std::string object itself and therefore cheap to read)