TLE - The ultimate explanation

Hello @all,

This post is motivated by the excessive and overwhelming number of comments during SEP13 Long Contest about people getting TLE with 1.01 sec, while people with 10 sec or more get AC…

These sort of comments:

@admin m getting time limit exceeded!! email says compilation time is 1.01 sec!! and there are solutions of more than 1.01 sec…please help!!! stuck at this one…!”

are becoming too prevalent and it’s only because people can’t read the FAQ

The shown time limit is the sum of the time taken over ALL the test case files and the time limit for the problem is defined PER CASE FILE!

So, if we have a program with 5 test case files, each with a TL of 1 sec, these means that the range of execution time of Accepted solutions for that problem can vary between 0.00 sec - 5.00 sec…

This time limit is again the sum of the time taken over ALL the test case files that are configured in the system for the given problem

I hope this can clear some people and hopefully reduce the number of such comments, which add nothing to the problem or to the contest… Please try to read the FAQ, before commenting, it will be better for everyone :slight_smile:

Best regards,

Bruno

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I remember my initial days at Codechef, when I used to shout at myself “Oh God! I have optimized my code so well, but this 0.01 sec is causing TLE” :smiley:

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