vertex arays again and again...

i have finally decided to make my engine to use vetex arrays (ok, i have decided about 2 months ago but now i’m really going to do it )

so the problem is: how do you manage vertex arrays when you have a little complex geometry (not a rotating cube). do you create one huge vertex array for all vertices and then use some nasty alghoritm to search for unused entries or you prefer to create a separate array for each object in scene?

and which one is faster? does often calls to glVertexPointer (or some similar function) slow down the program?

i need your help guys, i’m lost…