Performance evaluation of list iteration methods in Java: an empirical study

Abstract

Introduction: Lists are used in various software applications including web applications, desktop applications, and Internet of
Things (IoT) applications to store different types of items (e.g.
country name, product model, and device category). Users can select one or more of these items to perform specific tasks such as
filling forms, ordering products, reading device data, etc. In some
software applications, lists store a huge number of items to be iterated over in order to know what users have selected. From a software development perspective, there are a number of methods to
iterate over list items. Materials and Methods: In this paper, five
list iteration methods: Classic For, Enhanced For, Iterator, List Iterator, and For Each have been compared experimentally with each
other with regard to their performance (execution time required to
iterate over list items). Thus, a number of experimental test scenarios have been conducted to obtain the comparison results. Results
and Discussion: The experimental results of this study have been
presented in Table 4. Conclusions: Overall performance evaluation showed that Iterator and List Iterator methods outperformed
other list iteration methods in all test scenarios. However, List Iterator outperformed Iterator when the list size was small. On the
other hand, Iterator outperformed List Iterator when the list size
was large.