Hi everyone. I will try my best to explain my problem and my line of thought on how I think I can solve it. I use this code for root, dirs, files in os.walk(downloaddir): for infile in files: f = open(os.path.join(root,infile),'rb') filehash = hashlib.md5() while True: data = f.read(10240) if len(data) == 0: break filehash.update(data) print "FILENAME: " , infile print "FILE HASH: " , filehash.hexdigest() and using start = time.time() elapsed = time.time() - start I measure how long it takes to calculate an hash. Pointing my code to a file with 653megs this is the result: root@Mars:/home/tiago# python algorithm-timer.py FILENAME: freebsd.iso FILE HASH: ace0afedfa7c6e0ad12c77b6652b02ab 12.624 root@Mars:/home/tiago# python algorithm-timer.py FILENAME: freebsd.iso FILE HASH: ace0afedfa7c6e0ad12c77b6652b02ab 12.373 root@Mars:/home/tiago# python algorithm-timer.py FILENAME: freebsd.iso FILE HASH: ace0afedfa7c6e0ad12c77b6652b02ab 12.540 Ok now 12 seconds +- on a 653mb file, my problem is I intend to use this code on a program that will run through multiple files, some of them might be 4/5/6Gb and it will take wayy longer to calculate. What am wondering is if there is a faster way for me to calculate the hash of the file? Maybe by doing some multithreading? I used a another script to check the use of the CPU second by second and I see that my code is only using 1 out of my 2 CPUs and only at 25% max, any way I can change this? Thank you all in advance for the given help.