Time and Space Considerations Click on the banner to return to the user guide home page. This section presents a very approximate analysis and comparison of the time and space requirements for a variety of common operations on different specific collections and collection families. We've presented the information as a set of tables that lists the operation, the time cost and the space cost.
Any applicable comments appear at the bottom of the table.
A key to the abbreviations used in the tables appears at the bottom of each page. As you read these analyses, keep in mind that various processors, operating systems, compilation optimizations, and many other factors will affect the exact values. The point of these tables is to provide you with some idea of how the behaviors of the various collections will compare, all other things being equal . For more details on algorithm complexity, refer to Knuth, Sedgewick, or any number of other books. Time costs for each pointer dereference, copy, destroy, allocate, or comparison are considered equal.