I did fix a few typos but my benchmark isn't nearly as sophisticated as yours. I reran the tests using your code and am getting similar results, albeit my rate is much slower :(.

Following BorisZ's comment, I placed the hash setup outside the cmpthese and indeed it is coming out as the speed demon. Interesting, I tried doing the same with the my %bucket line in your code and the performance decreased dramatically. I guess that using local variables provides better performance than globals?

Thanks again for the insights!