Memory usage and lists

I am working on a project right now that uses a list to store keys, short strings and positions. In an earlier version, I used three separate lists, but in my current version, I changed it to one strided list. Intuitively I thought it might use less memory to use the one list, but it appears that using multiple lists uses less memory.

When I was adding 1 entry to three lists, I used around 170 bytes of memory per new entry. Now with 1 list, it seems to be eating about 200 bytes of memory per entry.

Does this seem right? Are lists more memory efficient if they only contain one type?

Hmm... another observation is that the list seems to get more memory efficient, the more entries you add.

Because you can't change a list "in place", long lists can have a high momentary cost in script memory when being manipulated.

Several lists does seem to take up less memory than one long one in my experience and testing too.

And certainly manipulating longer lists takes more time and power, I think the buzz words are n^2 lists for lsl compared to some other process - but basically the longer the list gets its a power relationship rather than a simple multiple relationship, so 3 lists of length n would be 3n^2 to process, one list of length 3n would be (3n)^2 or 9n^2 to process - much slower.