Choosing the right collection

[O. Ziggy]

I am looking for a 'Summary' list of all the Java collections detailing the pros and cons of each. I am particularly interested in things like

- Which provide faster iteration
- Which provide faster search
- Which provide slower iteration
- Which provide faster insertion or removal

I have seen some sites by searching on Google but i am looking for just a summary preferable in table format.

Thanks in advance.

[Arif Hossain]

May be you have seen this page already, but it looked like a good summary to me.

Java Collections Overview

[fred rosenberger]

Note that you are possibly going to have a hard time finding this..."fastest" is usually not something people care about. They generally care about how quickly time grows as the sample grows.

In other words, there may be a collection that always takes 20 seconds to return an element you are searching for. there may be another that take 1/100th of a second per element in the collection. Which is faster?

well, if I have 20 elements, option A takes 20 seconds, option b takes 1/5th of a second.

If i have 1,000,000 elements, option A takes 20 seconds. Option B takes about three hours.

Which collection is 'faster'? The answer is "it depends on your data set".