Hashing is critical for high performance computer architecture. Hashing is used extensively in hardware applications, such as page tables, for address translation. Bit extraction and exclusive ORing hashing "methods" are two commonly used hashing functions for hardware applications. There is no study of the performance of these functions and no mention anywhere of the practical performance of the hashing functions in comparison with the theoretical performance prediction of hashing schemes. In this paper, we show that, by choosing hashing functions at random from a particular class, called H/sub 3/, of hashing functions, the analytical performance of hashing can be achieved in practice on real-life data. Our results about the expected worst case performance of hashing are of special significance, as they provide evidence for earlier theoretical predictions.