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I have a linked list of around 5000 entries (‘NOT’ inserted simultaneously), and I am traversing the list, looking for a particular entry on occasions (though this is not very often), should I consider Hash Table as a more optimum choice for this case, replacing the linked list (which is doubly-linked & linear) ?? Using C in Linux.
If you have not found the code to be the slow part of the application via a profiler then you shouldn’t do anything about it yet.
If it is slow, but the code is tested, works, and is clear, and there are other slower areas that you can work on speeding up do those first.
If it is buggy then you need to fix it anyways, go for the hash table as it will be faster than the list. This assumes that the order that the data is traversed does not matter, if you care about what the insertion order is then stick with the list (you can do things with a hash table and keep the order, but that will make the code much tricker).
Given that you need to search the list only on occasion the odds of this being a significant bottleneck in your code is small.
Another data structure to look at is a ‘skip list’ which basically lets you skip over a large portion of the list. This requires that the list be sorted however, which, depending on what you are doing, may make the code slower overall.