Large Sequences performing worse than large lists

1

So in the Kotlin in Action book, it talks about using Sequences when you have a large data set so you don’t incur the larger memory in dealing with each filter map function compared to using a standard List or Iterable.

In my gist CollectionAndSequence.kt · GitHub I wrote some code to average out over 1000 iterations of running filter map from 100-1,000,000 times
I’m not sure why this is the case, but List came out on top for larger sets on average instead of smaller sets of 100.

fun squareNumbers(range: CollectionRange): List<Int> = range.rangeList.filter { it % 3 == 0 }.map { it * it }.filter { it % 4 == 0 }.map { it * 3 }.filter { it % 4 == 0 }

fun squareNumbersSequence(range: CollectionRange) = range.rangeList.asSequence().filter { it % 3 == 0 }.map { it * it }.filter { it % 4 == 0 }.map { it * 3 }.filter { it % 4 == 0 }.toList()

I did filter{}.map{}.filter{}.map{}.filter{} as the list of operations. Can someone shed some light why Sequences perform slower than lists for filter map compared to List Iterables?

2

The big diference is that the values of the Sequence are evaluated lazily so it does’t use a huge amount of memory. The performance of the List might be better but you can run out of memory easily depending on the amount/size of elements in the list.

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