: When piping, Hashcat cannot build a dictionary cache. This means every time you restart the attack, Hashcat must re-read the entire stream from the beginning. Performance Considerations
: Reading a smaller compressed file from a fast NVMe drive can sometimes be more efficient than reading the raw text, provided your CPU can keep up with decompression. hashcat compressed wordlist
: A 2.5TB wordlist can often be compressed down to roughly 250GB using Gzip. : When piping, Hashcat cannot build a dictionary cache
# Using gunzip for .gz files gunzip -c wordlist.gz | hashcat -m 0 -a 0 hashes.txt # Using 7z for .7z files 7z e wordlist.7z -so | hashcat -m 0 -a 0 hashes.txt Use code with caution. Using Hashcat to load a compressed wordlist - Super User
: If you are cracking a "fast" hash (like MD5 or NTLM) at billions of hashes per second, your CPU’s decompression speed may become a bottleneck, slowing down your GPU. Using Hashcat to load a compressed wordlist - Super User