Question

I have a scenario where I have a class that’s a listener to a server. When I am notified I keep adding a string of values to an ArrayList. I now have threads that read from this ArrayList.

This ArrayList has the potential of becoming very large. I’m thinking of spawning a thread that checks every 10 mins if the max size has been reached and deletes a few lines that were added.

I was wondering what is the best way to achieve this?

Should I be using another DS?

Answer 1

You might want to consider using a LinkedList.

                 ArrayList    LinkedList
add                O(1)*         O(1)
remove             O(n)          O(n)
Iterator.remove    O(n)          O(1)
insert             O(n)          O(1)
get                O(1)          O(n)

* ArrayList.add runs in O(n) worst case if the array needs to be resized.