There are situations where you can have a linked list perform faster than a vector. It's good to consider linked lists if you have the time to think about your

There are situations where you can have a linked list perform faster than a vector. It's good to consider linked lists if you have the time to think about your solution and profile multiple options... but the point is that memory latency is a huge hurdle to overcome. For context: A cold memory fetch is ~200 cycles. That's around 10 incorrectly-predicted branches. That's around 100 correctly-predicted branches. You need to be skipping a lot of work to justify injecting 100s of cycles of lag inside a loop of some sort. (And, of course, those situations would need to be the common, relevant case. Don't follow a 10x performance speed-up in a one-off situation at a time no-one cares about to justify a 5x slowdown in a critical, hot loop.) If you have big objects, then this might also start to become a concern. However, in those cases, a vector of pointers (or structs of pointers + metadata) would appear as a new challenger. In that case, you would only take the latency hit if you actually need to go to the object (and those objects could be held in contiguous storage, etc. etc. etc.). Chances are that, unless you have data for your specific case showing otherwise, vector will probably win. It should be the default unless you have a reason not to, and evidence to back it up.