Array or List in Java. Which is faster?

Question

I have to keep thousands of strings in memory to be accessed serially in Java. Should I store them in an array or should I use some kind of List ?

Since arrays keep

Answer 1

Depending on the implementation. it's possible that an array of primitive types will be smaller and more efficient than ArrayList. This is because the array will store the values directly in a contiguous block of memory, while the simplest ArrayList implementation will store pointers to each value. On a 64-bit platform especially, this can make a huge difference.

Of course, it's possible for the jvm implementation to have a special case for this situation, in which case the performance will be the same.