Senior
ArrayList vs LinkedList for sequential iteration over 100 million elements — which is preferable?
sobes.tech AI
Answer from AI
For sequential iteration over 100 million elements, it is preferable to use ArrayList for the following reasons:
- Access performance:
ArrayListstores elements in a contiguous array, providing fast index-based access and good data locality in memory. - Iteration: Sequential traversal of the array is very efficient due to CPU caching.
- LinkedList stores elements in nodes linked by references, which leads to frequent memory jumps and degrades performance due to poor data locality.
Thus, for large volumes of data and sequential iteration, ArrayList will be significantly faster and more memory-efficient than LinkedList. LinkedList makes sense if you often need insert/delete operations in the middle of the list, but for simple iteration, this is not relevant.