What is the best List implementation for Large lists in java

Question

I have to create a large list of n elements (could be up to 100,000). each element in the list is an integer equivalent to the index of the list. After this I have to call Collections.shuffle on this list. My question is, which list implementation (either java collections or apache collections) should be used. My gut feeling is ArrayList can well be used here. All thoughts are appreciated. Thanks!

Thanks for the inputs. I think I am sticking to the ArrayList. I am currently using the ArrayList constructor with the initialCapacity param and I pass the size of the list. So if the original list is 100000, I create this new list with new ArrayList(100000); Hence I think I don't have the create an array and do an asList since there won't be any resizing. Also, most of the apache collections Lists like GrowthList & LazyList do not implement RandomAccess. This for sure would slow down the shuffle (as per javadocs). FastArrayList does implement RandomAccess but apache has a note for this class saying "This class is not cross-platform. Using it may cause unexpected failures on some architectures".

Answer 1

ArrayList most probably has the least overhead per list element, so should be the best choice. It might be a worse choice if you frequently need to delete items in the middle of the list.