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Why are arrays faster than arraylist?


Asked by Bethany Pearson on Nov 29, 2021 FAQ



An array is faster and that is because ArrayList uses a fixed amount of array. However when you add an element to the ArrayList and it overflows. It creates a new Array and copies every element from the old one to the new one.
In respect to this,
ArrayList has direct references to every element in the list, so it can get the n-th element in constant time. LinkedList has to traverse the list from the beginning to get to the n-th element. LinkedList is faster than ArrayList for deletion.
Besides, The bigger downside of arrays and ArrayList is they fragment free memory and overwork the garbage collector. As an ArrayList expands, it creates new, bigger arrays, copies the old array to the new one, and frees the old one.
In fact,
So retrieving an item by index from an ArrayList is actually faster than retrieving an element from a HashTable by key. On the other hand, removing an item from an ArrayList, has a linear complexity. That is, because you remove an item from the ArrayList, a re-indexing could be needed.
Furthermore,
In Java, following are two different ways to create an array. Array: Simple fixed sized arrays that we create in Java, like below int arr[] = new int[10] ArrayList : Dynamic sized arrays in Java that implement List interface. ArrayList<Type> arrL = new ArrayList<Type>(); Here Type is the type of elements in ArrayList to be created.