Specific choices about how to represent complex networks can have a substantial effect on the execution time required for the respective construction and analysis of those structures. In this work we report a comparison of the effects of representing complex networks statically as matrices or dynamically as spase structures. Three theoretical models of complex networks are considered: two types of Erdos-Renyi as well as the Barabasi-Albert model. We investigated the effect of the different representations with respect to the construction and measurement of several topological properties (i.e. degree, clustering coefficient, shortest path length, and betweenness centrality). We found that different forms of representation generally have a substantial effect on the execution time, with the sparse representation frequently resulting in remarkably superior performance.