Hashrate drops by 50% when using mask attack

[PixelRain]

Hi All,

I'm relatively new to hashcat and have been doing escrow bounties in my spare time.
My -b reports 32,000MH/s on MD5, but when running a mask attack against 400K hashes it drops to 17,000 MH/s,

My current config is this:
hashcat input.txt -a 3 -m 0 -w 4 -o cracked.txt masks.txt --optimized-kernel-enable --opencl-device-types=2 --status --status-timer=2

When running my CPU in tandem with GPU, it drops to 6,000MH/s..

Is there any optimization to get upto or close to the -b speeds or is my current speed a limit hit from using a mask attack?

[marc1n]

This is probably due to the length of your masks and hence the difficulty level.

[slyexe]

See the FAQ :

https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=fre...full_speed

Trying using wordlist with a large collection of rules or hybrid attacks is the solution, but feel free to read the details and try for yourself!