If you’re having a hard time debugging and you’re using Linux pipelines or bash, one very persnickety error that you may be dealing with is an extra \n whitespace in your text that will ruin things.
It’ll just say ‘too slow’ and you will drive yourself insane, when the actual problem is that you’re calculating the md5sum of TEXT\n instead of TEXT. Definitely using a language with better inbuilt string support (python/ruby/whatever) is suggested, or otherwise be extremely careful about whitespace.