Faster alternative to vectors?

Question

I have a file with 25'000 lines of text. I read in line by line, placing each line as a String Element into a Vector. Later I read out again all or parts of those Vector Elements.
I found that Vector.add() is too slow to process such a hughe number of lines; it's lasting some minutes.
So my question; Is there a faster alternativ to vector i could use? any ideas?

Answer 1

Here's why setting initial capacity/increment helps. What's stored in the Vector internally is an array of references to each Object contained within the list. Let's say the initial capacity is 10. To add the 11th element, it's got a have an internal array big enough, so it has to allocate a new array with a bigger size, copy the original references over, then add number 11 to the array. The increment determines the number of extra slots it adds with each reallocation.
Also, Vector is thread safe, with slows it down.
Either use ArrayList, which is not thread safe, and use a high initial capacity and step increment. Another option is to use LinkedList, which doesn't have the allocation problem. The catch to using it, though, is that if you wish to access an element by index, it's much slower. If you want to iterate though the whole list, get an Iterator object off the list.