What's faster? A vector or a list?

Actual program performance is non-intuitive. Stroustrup, the author
of C++, included measurements in a talk for ordered insertion in C++
vectors and lists. We (E.Soriano and me) measured the same issue using C in Plan 9, Mac
OS X, and Linux, and C++ in Mac OS X.

Well, it seems that it's not clear at all which data structure is better for
something as simple as sorted insertion. Depending on the implementation of
the containers, on the system, and the language used, one or another may be
the right choice. There are so many factors that I'd say it cannot be predicted.

Thus, we might say that it doesn't really matter. Pick your preferred one and do not optimize early. All in all, it might be the better one, or the worse one; nobody really knows.

See Some Performance Experiments for Simple Data Structures for the experiments.