One of the tests I saw on here only conducts the test once. But what I have noticed is that you need to run these tests many times and eventually their times will converge. Basically the JVM needs to warm up. For my particular use case I needed to add/remove items to a list that grows to about 500 items. In my tests LinkedList came out faster, with LinkedList coming in around 50,000 NS and ArrayList coming in at around 90,000 NS... give or take. See the code below.
public static void main(String[] args) { List<Long> times = new ArrayList<>(); for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { times.add(doIt()); } System.out.println("avg = "+ (times.stream().mapToLong(x -> x).average()));}static long doIt() { long start = System.nanoTime(); List<Object> list = new LinkedList<>(); //uncomment line below to test with ArrayList //list = new ArrayList<>(); for (int i = 0; i < 500; i++) { list.add(i); } Iterator it = list.iterator(); while (it.hasNext()) { it.next(); it.remove(); } long end = System.nanoTime(); long diff = end - start; //uncomment to see the JVM warmup and get faster for the first few iterations //System.out.println(diff) return diff;}