Why does Java's ArrayList's remove function seem to cost so little?

Question

I have a function which manipulates a very large list, exceeding about 250,000 items. For the majority of those items, it simply replaces the item at position x. However, fo

Answer 1

I think the difference in performance is likely coming down to the difference that ArrayList supports random access where LinkedList does not.

If I want to get(1000) of an ArrayList I am specifying a specific index to access this, however LinkedList doesn't support this as it is organized through Node references.

If I call get(1000) of LinkedList, it will iterate the entire list until if finds index 1000 and this can be exorbitantly expensive if you have a large number of items in the LinkedList.