The most frequent element in a list (the mode)

[AvDav]

I'd be thankful if someone enlighten me how to solve this problem in most efficient manner both in terms of speed and memory consumption.
Example: [4,5,6,7,12,6,8,9,4,6,8,4,97,4] the answer is 4, the only solution that occured to me is to hold counters in a hash table and pick the maximum element. However, there could some circumstances where this could be inefficient, so I wonder if some straightforward method is available.

Thanks beforehand and regards.