When should I use a TreeMap over a PriorityQueue and vice versa?

Question

Seems they both let you retrieve the minimum, which is what I need for Prim\'s algorithm, and force me to remove and reinsert a key to update its value. Is there any advanta

Answer 1

One of the differences is that remove(Object) and contains(Object) are linear O(N) in a normal heap based PriorityQueue (like Oracle's), but O(log(N)) for a TreeSet/Map.

So if you have a large number of elements and do a lot of remove(Object) or contains(Object), then a TreeSet/Map may be faster.