A lot of people are saying that once you get to the size where speed is actually a concern that HashSet<T> will always beat List<T>, but that depends on what you are doing.
Let’s say you have a List<T> that will only ever have on average 5 items in it. Over a large number of cycles, if a single item is added or removed each cycle, you may well be better off using a List<T>.
I did a test for this on my machine, and, well, it has to be very very small to get an advantage from List<T>. For a list of short strings, the advantage went away after size 5, for objects after size 20.
1 item LIST strs time: 617ms 1 item HASHSET strs time: 1332ms 2 item LIST strs time: 781ms 2 item HASHSET strs time: 1354ms 3 item LIST strs time: 950ms 3 item HASHSET strs time: 1405ms 4 item LIST strs time: 1126ms 4 item HASHSET strs time: 1441ms 5 item LIST strs time: 1370ms 5 item HASHSET strs time: 1452ms 6 item LIST strs time: 1481ms 6 item HASHSET strs time: 1418ms 7 item LIST strs time: 1581ms 7 item HASHSET strs time: 1464ms 8 item LIST strs time: 1726ms 8 item HASHSET strs time: 1398ms 9 item LIST strs time: 1901ms 9 item HASHSET strs time: 1433ms 1 item LIST objs time: 614ms 1 item HASHSET objs time: 1993ms 4 item LIST objs time: 837ms 4 item HASHSET objs time: 1914ms 7 item LIST objs time: 1070ms 7 item HASHSET objs time: 1900ms 10 item LIST objs time: 1267ms 10 item HASHSET objs time: 1904ms 13 item LIST objs time: 1494ms 13 item HASHSET objs time: 1893ms 16 item LIST objs time: 1695ms 16 item HASHSET objs time: 1879ms 19 item LIST objs time: 1902ms 19 item HASHSET objs time: 1950ms 22 item LIST objs time: 2136ms 22 item HASHSET objs time: 1893ms 25 item LIST objs time: 2357ms 25 item HASHSET objs time: 1826ms 28 item LIST objs time: 2555ms 28 item HASHSET objs time: 1865ms 31 item LIST objs time: 2755ms 31 item HASHSET objs time: 1963ms 34 item LIST objs time: 3025ms 34 item HASHSET objs time: 1874ms 37 item LIST objs time: 3195ms 37 item HASHSET objs time: 1958ms 40 item LIST objs time: 3401ms 40 item HASHSET objs time: 1855ms 43 item LIST objs time: 3618ms 43 item HASHSET objs time: 1869ms 46 item LIST objs time: 3883ms 46 item HASHSET objs time: 2046ms 49 item LIST objs time: 4218ms 49 item HASHSET objs time: 1873ms
Here is that data displayed as a graph:
Here’s the code:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
int times = 10000000;
for (int listSize = 1; listSize < 10; listSize++)
{
List<string> list = new List<string>();
HashSet<string> hashset = new HashSet<string>();
for (int i = 0; i < listSize; i++)
{
list.Add("string" + i.ToString());
hashset.Add("string" + i.ToString());
}
Stopwatch timer = new Stopwatch();
timer.Start();
for (int i = 0; i < times; i++)
{
list.Remove("string0");
list.Add("string0");
}
timer.Stop();
Console.WriteLine(listSize.ToString() + " item LIST strs time: " + timer.ElapsedMilliseconds.ToString() + "ms");
timer = new Stopwatch();
timer.Start();
for (int i = 0; i < times; i++)
{
hashset.Remove("string0");
hashset.Add("string0");
}