Fig. 1

Wall-clock time required by the commands mash sketch, sourmash sketch and frac-kmc-sketch to compute a sketch. The input files are fastq.gz files containing metagenome samples taken from the human gut. MinHash sketches of 1000 was computed, and FracMinHash sketch with scale factors \(s = 0.001\) was computed. When using 32 threads, frac-kmc finishes roughly 10 times faster than sourmash, and roughly 6.7 times faster than Mash. When running on a single thread, frac-kmc runs up to 70% faster than sourmash. On small inputs, frac-kmc runs roughly 20% slower than Mash, but runs roughly 15% faster for files larger than 5 GB