crc32 and VMID for unique names

[Stephanie Smith]

I want to generate unique names.
The VMID object is unique within a jvm.
I create the VMID, and then pass the bytes into CRC32 and convert to hex string.

Should this generated hex string be unique within like 100,000 iterations of creating a name? how likely are duplicates?
I have tested it with over 700K iterations (of creating VMID, passing into CRC32 and converting to hex string) with no duplicates but wanted to know if duplicates were possible.

Thanks for any advice.

[Ladislav Honsa]

Hello,

What do you want to use the unique names for? How many unique names do you need to generate?
I would probably use the java.util.UUID class instead. An UUID is 128 bit (i.e. 10^38) long. Of course, you can get duplicates. However it is VERY unlikely. See this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUID#Random_UUID_probability_of_duplicates

Ladislav