Regd memory allocation

[J Lalit]

Hi,

I want to know how & where jvm gives memory allocation to an arraylist or vector when it is expanded automatically or lets say if arraylist is having default size 16 & say after 12 it will get another 16 blocks then from where & how jvm does this?

[Sebastian Janisch]

An ArrayList is implemented with an array ... With a starting capacity of 20 or so ..

When the array is full, a new one is created with double the capacity and the old elements are copied into the new array.

And arrays directly point to a space in the memory .. this is why getting elements in an ArrayList is so fast (as opposed to LinkedList) and inserting a lot of elements takes some time, because the array has to be expanded over and over again and the elements need to be copied (as opposed to LinkedList)

[Rob Spoor]

Sebastian Janisch wrote:An ArrayList is implemented with an array ... With a starting capacity of 20 or so ..

10 unless otherwise specified in the constructor.

When the array is full, a new one is created with double the capacity and the old elements are copied into the new array.

Not doubled; the new array size will become the old array size * 1.5 + 1, so 50% is added instead of 100%. (The +1 is to make sure the array still gets enlarged if the old array size is 0.)

[Campbell Ritchie]

In your Java installation folder you will find a file called src.zip. If you unzip that, you can find the ArrayList class and examine the code to see how it works.