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How Do Java's Lists Measure Up? Comparing Arrays, Lists, and Maps

In one of my last Java projects, I had to store a large number of ordered objects for display in a Web application. Sometimes the number of elements was quite large, maybe many thousands, and displaying them would, of course, involve a scrolling mechanism in the GUI.

Because the list of objects would be of a fixed size, the obvious solution was use an array, as this would ensure good performance when storing and retrieving elements from the array. But if the size is not fixed and elements need to be inserted, updated, or deleted at random spots in the list?

Java offers several solutions for storing objects in an ordered list: arrays, Lists, and Maps—to mention the best known. This article analyzes the performance benefits and drawbacks of these lists using several examples.

What Will Be Measured

In order to decide which solution is the most appropriate for a given situation, you'll need to consider what your application will need to do:

Insert elements at the end of a list
Insert elements in the beginning of a list
Insert elements at random positions in a list
Access elements from the first to the last
Access elements from the last to the first
Access elements in random order
Update elements in random order

In the accompanying examples, you'll be testing the simple array, the List Interface, and the Map Interface. The test runs were repeated several times to ensure stable results. To avoid interference from garbage collection or other side effects, the various functions were tested in separate program executions on each data structure. Indexes used in the random order functions were generated before the performance clock was started. The newest JRE (1.5.0_09) was used in all runs.

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