I have found out that calculating sha256 in java is slow. For example, it is slower than python. I wrote two simple benchmarks that calculate sha256 of 1GB of zeroes. In both cases the result is the same and correct, but the python time is 5653ms and the java time is 8623ms(53% slower). The result is similar every time and this is an important difference for me.

How to make the calculation in java faster?

Benchmarks:

Java:

```
import java.security.MessageDigest;
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;

public class BenchmarkSha256 {

  public static void main(String... args) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException {
    int size = 1024 * 1024;
    byte[] bytes = new byte[size];
    MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
    long startTime = System.nanoTime();
    for (int i = 0; i < 1024; i++)
      md.update(bytes, 0, size);
    long endTime = System.nanoTime();
    System.out.println(String.format("%1$064x", new java.math.BigInteger(1, md.digest())));
    System.out.println(String.format("%d ms", (endTime - startTime) / 1000000));
  }

}

```

Python:

```
#!/usr/bin/env python

import hashlib
import time

size = 1024 * 1024
bytes = bytearray(size)
md = hashlib.sha256()
startTime = time.time()
for i in range(0, 1024):
  md.update(bytes)
endTime = time.time()
print "%s\n%d ms" % (md.hexdigest(), (endTime - startTime) * 1000)

```

results:

```
~> java BenchmarkSha256
49bc20df15e412a64472421e13fe86ff1c5165e18b2afccf160d4dc19fe68a14
8623 ms

~> python BenchmarkSha256.py 
49bc20df15e412a64472421e13fe86ff1c5165e18b2afccf160d4dc19fe68a14
5653 ms

```

versions of java and python:

```
~> java -version
java version "1.6.0_26"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_26-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.1-b02, mixed mode)

~> python --version
Python 2.7

```