](https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/palindrome-index) Palindrome Index

I've been having a problem with an easy HackerRank problem, Palindrome Index.

I knew that I was on the right track since answers for test cases were correct. But then I ran into a problem where most of test cases time out after submitting the code.

I'd like to talk about how I solved the performance issue.

HackerRank allows only up to 3 seconds of execution time per test case for C# programs. For some of the test cases, my program ran fine but for the majority of them, it was timing out.

I came up with 4 different implementations for the problem but I wasn't still able to solve all issues (There were still 4 out of 15 cases that were timing out for the last implementation. You can see the history of my implementation changes on GitHub).

I reached the point where I couldn't think any more after only 4 tries. Then I looked around optimization techniques and many websites suggested using profiling tools. I have a license for JetBrains dotTrace so I decided to give it a try.

My eyes opened wide as soon as I profile the code. There it was! The bottleneck!

The problem was that, I was unnecessarily creating a new object for each loop iteration. After moving the object creation out of the loop, the code ran within a second.

The code was changed from

1for (int i = 0; i < testCase.Length; i++) {2 StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder(testCase);3 if (testCase\[i\] != testCase\[testCase.Length - i - 1\]) {4  if (IsPalindrome2(buffer.Remove(i, 1)))5   return i;6  return testCase.Length - i - 1;7 }8}

to

1StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder(testCase);2for (int i = 0; i < testCase.Length; i++) {3 if (testCase\[i\] != testCase\[testCase.Length - i - 1\]) {4  if (IsPalindrome2(buffer.Remove(i, 1)))5   return i;6  return testCase.Length - i - 1;7 }8}

StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder(testCase) was moved out of the for loop. It was that simple. I spent hours trying to come up with different algorithms without catching that simple error/bad coding.

Conclusion

I learned 4 different ways of failures, which I'd get around next time.

I am glad to have run into this issue while solving a coding question instead of during writing a production code at work.

And also I learned to appreciate all the tools at disposal.