Efficiency questions

Question

Hi,

I have to manage XML documents and Strings in my app.

In terms of efficiency and memory usage, will a collection like ArrayList be much more expensive than String[]? Also, I could store the content as a regular String or XML. Is working with XML also more expensive? (When I say expensive, I am referring to the use of system resources.)

Those Strings will include xml's.. all i gonna do is pass them to another appz and those appz will deal with them.. nothing more..the ArrayList will hold dynamiclly around 20 Strings each.. and ill will need to 'for each' it, get the content of the string and send it to another app.

If there are differences, are they significant?

Thanks, Ray.

Answer 1

It depends very much on what you're doing with the strings and how you're using them.

However, from my recent experience using an ArrayList of strings for processing quickly and repeatedly, I found a String[] array 8-10 times as fast for my purposes (read string and compare in a while loop).

It seemed really odd (and annoying because I wanted dynamic size), but the execution time spoke for itself.

Like I say, this is from my own experience recently and I'm just being general. Perhaps if you provide more information on what you're trying to achieve, we may give you more specific advice.