Robust and fast checksum algorithm?

Question

Which checksum algorithm can you recommend in the following use case?

I want to generate checksums of small JPEG files (~8 kB each) to check if the content changed.

Answer 1

According to the Wiki page pointed to by Luke, MD5 is actually faster than CRC32!

I have tried this myself by using Python 2.6 on Windows Vista, and got the same result.

Here are some results:

crc32: 162.481544276 MBps md5: 224.489791549 MBps

crc32: 168.332996575 MBps md5: 226.089336532 MBps

crc32: 155.851515828 MBps md5: 194.943289532 MBps

I am thinking about the same question as well, and I'm tempted to use the Rsync's variation of Adler-32 for detecting file differences.