printf slows down my program

Question

I have a small C program to calculate hashes (for hash tables). The code looks quite clean I hope, but there\'s something unrelated to it that\'s bugging me.

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Answer 1

1. I/O is always slow in comparison to straight computation. The system has to wait for more components to be available in order to use them. It then has to wait for the response before it can carry on. Conversely if it's simply computing, then it's only really moving data between the RAM and CPU registers.

2. I've not tested this, but it may be quicker to append your hashes onto a string, and then just print the string at the end. Although if you're using C, not C++, this may prove to be a pain!

3 and 4 are beyond me I'm afraid.