Regarding the original proposition of faster access to the EntityList - I've not looked at the code for too long but it seems there is a lot of commitment in terms of coding/time/learning invested in the existing structure, it would be painful to discard that.
Another problem is that the number of elements of a particular type varies enormously by zone. For example in freeport the doors elements are quite high, in lavastorm, not so many. So dividing into separate doors, items, etc, wouldn't be so effective for many zones. Short lists are as wasteful as long ones in time terms.
One way of handling even breaking up of long lists where you have a quickly accessible int based ID is just to use a hashtable structure over the linked lists. So the lists still remain we just have an array of n ElementLists then use (ID MOD n) to allocate an object with a given ID to the appropriate list. This gives a fairly even distribution of Elements to lists without caring too much about their type, the hashing operation is very quick so shouldn't introduce excessive overhead and in larger zones n can be set to a greater number.
S'cuse my C++ being rusty, I've been playing java only for the last few years but just to give the rough idea.
class EntityFarm
{
private:
int n = 20;
EntityList* lists[n];
public:
EntityFarm() { }
~EntityFarm() {}
int16 Hash(int16 ID ) { return (ID MOD n; }
Mob* GetMob(int16 id) { &lists[Hash(id)]->GetMob(id)
....
Yeah, I know the syntax is wrong in there somewhere you get the idea though. The initial cost of deciding on the right list to use *should* be paid off in the, fairly even, allocation of entities to lists and it also gives another tuning layer without adding too much complexity (by changing n). The Entity farm is just a wrapper on the EntityList so most if not all of the methods can be inline.
From your timings it doesn't look as though this aspect is *that* time critical though. Just offering this up as an idea for consideration in case you do need to address the list problem.
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