Out Of Mem - Solidity,Remix IDE

hi folks, I am a complete newbie to solidity, and I am trying out some projects for my learning, I have been primarily relying on the Remix browser IDE for my development and testing till now, but due to recent addition of some utility methods , whenever I call a particular method, the IDE crashes and show out of mem exception. Can someone help me out with this?
I understand I may be doing too many operations, causing the mem to run out, I have tried optimizing the code a bit, but that didn’t help, also tried disabling auto-compile, and enabled optimization, but no help so far
the utility methods I have added so far are for converting date in string format to epoch timestamp, since I couldn’t find any solidity lib compatible with my version of the compiler, I had to resort to writing the lib methods myself, which I suspect are not every gas efficient
but gas is not an issue at this point, since this contract is not meant to go live, and is for my own learning, so any insight into how to avoid out of mem or the dateTime and String utils libs would be really helpful. Thanks in advance