Yeah, I know, this is an ancient question, but I'll throw in my two cents:
LinkedList is almost always the wrong choice, performance-wise. There are some very specific algorithms where a LinkedList is called for, but those are very, very rare and the algorithm will usually specifically depend on LinkedList's ability to insert and delete elements in the middle of the list relatively quickly, once you've navigated there with a ListIterator.
There is one common use case in which LinkedList outperforms ArrayList: that of a queue. However, if your goal is performance, instead of LinkedList you should also consider using an ArrayBlockingQueue (if you can determine an upper bound on your queue size ahead of time, and can afford to allocate all the memory up front), or this CircularArrayList implementation. (Yes, it's from 2001, so you'll need to generify it, but I got comparable performance ratios to what's quoted in the article just now in a recent JVM)
