Best way to store many ItemStacks

Hello there,

for my auction house plugin where every user can offer items to sell i need to store many (probably hundrets) of ItemStacks.

Currently on server startup they get loaded from a config file and put into a List, at shutdown back into the config.

Is this the best way of doing that?
Thx for your suggestions

 

@Lordloss
What is wrong with the way you currently have it? Could you explain what you think your way is "lacking"?

 

@Lordloss I think your current way is just fine, putting them into a HashMap with a unique ID for each of them would stop the chance of trying to put an exact copy of an item into the List.

 

If you are planning on storing them for a while and/or easily retrieving them from a file, this is a good thread I found a while ago. https://bukkit.org/threads/serialize-inventory-to-single-string-and-vice-versa.92094/

 

@Zombie_Striker I was just not sure if this is the best way of doing it considering the performance.

@Gerov Exact copys are ok because its an shop menu and people are allowed to sell the same kind of stack two times

@elian1203 thanks for this but the config API is doing this perfectly. Especially because i need to save 3 lines of lore too.

thank you for your answers.