Using the first example, test the code against a mounted forensic image or two. What happens when the chunk_size
is set to a large value? What happens to performance and accuracy as that number is modified? Explore the process and see what modifications could be made to help a new user select helpful values. How would you automate this suggestion process? Perform these same tests with selecting a prime for calculation. In addition, we invite you to explore the Python array data type. Though we have not introduced it in this book, it is a C-like structure that is efficient and can store data of a fixed type in memory.
Another efficiency improvement may be to leverage the Cython library and compile the script into a pyd
file to allow it to run faster. Since the hashing process occurs in a compiled library, we may not see a great improvement in speed, though this library can be useful in future code. We could also explore the pypy interpreter for speed improvements.
We could...