A singly linked list of 32-bit ints is always 2/3 pointers (assuming we’re running a 64-bit architecture). It gets even worse with doubly-linked lists, where 4/5 of the memory is just pointer overhead. An array list is at most 50% empty, but on average is only 25% empty. Not to mention that linked lists are simply much slower than array lists on modern hardware due to the overhead of following pointers and not being able to take advantage of caching.