Array or List in Java. Which is faster?

Question

I have to keep thousands of strings in memory to be accessed serially in Java. Should I store them in an array or should I use some kind of List ?

Since arrays keep

Answer 1

Since there are already a lot of good answers here, I would like to give you some other information of practical view, which is insertion and iteration performance comparison : primitive array vs Linked-list in Java.

This is actual simple performance check.
So, the result will depend on the machine performance.

Source code used for this is below :

import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.LinkedList;

public class Array_vs_LinkedList {

    private final static int MAX_SIZE = 40000000;

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        LinkedList lList = new LinkedList(); 

        /* insertion performance check */

        long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();

        for (int i=0; i

Performance Result is below :