MurmurHash3 for Java

Background

I needed a really good hash function for the distributed indexing we’re implementing for Solr. Since it will be used for partitioning documents, it needed to be really high quality (well distributed) since we don’t want uneven shards. It also needs to be cross-platform, so a client could calculate this hash value themselves if desired, to predict which node has a given document.

MurmurHash3

MurmurHash3 is one of the top favorite new hash function these days, being both really fast and of high quality. Unfortunately it’s written in C++, and a quick google did not yield any suitable high quality port. So I took 15 minutes (it’s small!) to port the 32 bit version, since it should be faster than the other versions for small keys like document ids. It works in 32 bit chunks and produces a 32 bit hash – more than enough for partitioning documents by hash code.

MurmurHash3-java

It would be nice to prevent others from having to do the same thing. Since stuff like this is small enough, I simply put it under the public domain and uploaded to github. This way anyone can just copy the file or the function into their project and avoid extra dependencies and license hassles.

Here’s the code, copy away!