You're expanding the scope of the problem. In real life nobody is pulling shit off of a database and stuffing it into a linked list. And if they are the perform

You're expanding the scope of the problem. In real life nobody is pulling shit off of a database and stuffing it into a linked list. And if they are the performance will still be worse because each list will be allocated. Even if you do your own malloc you will blow cache with a linked list, because as time goes on your locality will be blown out. Iterating over a linked list will be worse as well. In fact, on modern architectures it may be faster to iterate over arrays just to take advantage of l2/l3 behaviors.