HashSet vs. List performance

Question

It\'s clear that a search performance of the generic HashSet class is higher than of the generic List class. Just compare the has

Answer 1

Depends on a lot of factors... List implementation, CPU architecture, JVM, loop semantics, complexity of equals method, etc... By the time the list gets big enough to effectively benchmark (1000+ elements), Hash-based binary lookups beat linear searches hands-down, and the difference only scales up from there.

Hope this helps!