BigInteger

Remarks

When To Use

BigInteger objects are by their very nature very heavy on RAM. Consequently, they should only be used when absolutely necessary, ie for numbers on a truly astronomical scale.

Further to this, all arithmetic operations on these objects are an order of magnitude slower than their primitive counterparts, this problem gets further compounded as the number grows as they are not of a fixed size. It is therefore feasibly possible for a rogue BigInteger to cause a crash by consuming all of the available RAM.

Alternatives

If speed is imperative to your solution it may be more efficient to implement this functionality yourself using a class wrapping a Byte[] and overloading the necessary operators yourself. However, this does require a significant amount of extra effort.