Java - Collections.sort() performance

Question

I\'m using Collections.sort() to sort a LinkedList whose elements implements Comparable interface, so they are sorted in a natural order. In the javadoc documentation its sa

Answer 1

If you say the list will be sorted "very frequent", you should consider holding the list in a sorted stated all the time, like using a tree instead of a LinkedList. Maybe you can even use some SortedSet instead of a List, if you don't have any duplicated values and don't need any List operations (as you are sorting them anyway all the time). Check the TreeSet class of the SortedSet implementation.

This implementation provides guaranteed log(n) time cost for the basic operations (add, remove and contains).

If you want to iterate over this "list" (which is actually a Set) you can use the Iterator of the class.

Returns an iterator over the elements in this set in ascending order.

If you have duplicate values inside the List you have to use some tricks (like putting the value in a new class which also got some delta for sorting equal object)