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

"Thousands" is not a large number. A few thousand paragraph-length strings are on the order of a couple of megabytes in size. If all you want to do is access these serially, use an immutable singly-linked List.