While creating classes in Java I often find myself creating instance-level collections that I know ahead of time will be very small - less than 10 items in the collection. But I don't know the number of items ahead of time so I typically opt for a dynamic collection (ArrayList, Vector, etc).

```
class Foo
{
  ArrayList<Bar> bars = new ArrayList<Bar>(10);
}

```

A part of me keeps nagging at me that it's wasteful to use complex dynamic collections for something this small in size. Is there a better way of implementing something like this? Or is this the norm?

Note, I'm not hit with any (noticeable) performance penalties or anything like that. This is just me wondering if there isn't a better way to do things.