Efficiency of the STL priority_queue

Question

I have an application (C++) that I think would be well served by an STL priority_queue. The documentation says:

Priority_queue is a cont

Answer 1

Q1: I didn't look in the standard, but AFAIK, using vector (or deque btw), the complexity would be O(1) for top(), O(log n) for push() and pop(). I once compared std::priority_queue with my own heap with O(1) push() and top() and O(log n) pop() and it certainly wasn't as slow as O(n).

Q2: set is not usable as underlying container for priority_queue (not a Sequence), but it would be possible to use set to implement a priority queue with O(log n) push() and pop(). However, this wouldn't probably outperform the std::priority_queue over std::vector implementation.