array of structures, or structure of arrays?

Question

Hmmm. I have a table which is an array of structures I need to store in Java. The naive don\'t-worry-about-memory approach says do this:

public class Record          


        

Answer 1

The answers that give the general "optimise when you have to" is unhelpful in this case because , IMHO, programmers should always be aware of the performance in different in design choices when that choice leads to an order of magnitude performance penalty, particularly API writers.

The original question is quite valid and I would tend to agree that the second approach is better, given his particular situation. I've written image processing code where each pixel requires a data structure, a situation not too dissimilar to this, except I needed frequent random access to each pixel. The overhead of creating one object for each pixel was enormous.