md4 seems to be the fastest: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.hash.php but produces 32 characters
crc32b is 8 characters and still one of the fastest hashes
echo hash('crc32b', 'http://stackoverflow.com');
This is posted there by luka8088 as performance results on 1000 Kb :
Results: (in microseconds)
1. md4 5307.912
2. md5 6890.058
3. crc32b 7298.946
4. crc32 7561.922
5. sha1 8886.098
6. tiger128,3 11054.992
7. haval192,3 11132.955
8. haval224,3 11160.135
9. tiger160,3 11162.996
10. haval160,3 11242.151
11. haval256,3 11327.981
12. tiger192,3 11630.058
13. haval128,3 11880.874
14. tiger192,4 14776.945
15. tiger128,4 14871.12
16. tiger160,4 14946.937
17. haval160,4 15661.954
18. haval192,4 15717.029
19. haval256,4 15759.944
20. adler32 15796.184
21. haval128,4 15887.022
22. haval224,4 16047.954
23. ripemd256 16245.126
24. haval160,5 17818.927
25. haval128,5 17887.115
26. haval224,5 18085.002
27. haval192,5 18135.07
28. haval256,5 18678.903
29. sha256 19020.08
30. ripemd128 20671.844
31. ripemd160 21853.923
32. ripemd320 22425.889
33. sha384 45102.119
34. sha512 45655.965
35. gost 57237.148
36. whirlpool 64682.96
37. snefru 80352.783
38. md2 705397.844
p.s. delicious used to use MD5 for all URI's (so delicious.com/md5hash for any uri)