is 0.7 seconds on the beagleboard and slicehost is more variable but comes to down to 0.5 seconds after a few goes from (1 second). I'd expect it to be read from the page cache anyway.
However, I remembered that the beagleboard is using busybox and really the systems are very different from each other, different distribution for example.
Update: busybox md5sum is about 20% slower than regular md5sum.
