  Within crystallization theory, (Matveev's) complexity of a 3-manifold can be
estimated by means of the combinatorial notion of GM-complexity. In this paper,
we prove that the GM-complexity of any lens space L(p,q), with p greater than
2, is bounded by S(p,q)-3, where S(p,q) denotes the sum of all partial
quotients in the expansion of q/p as a regular continued fraction. The above
upper bound had been already established with regard to complexity; its
sharpness was conjectured by Matveev himself and has been recently proved for
some infinite families of lens spaces by Jaco, Rubinstein and Tillmann. As a
consequence, infinite classes of 3-manifolds turn out to exist, where
complexity and GM-complexity coincide.
  Moreover, we present and briefly analyze results arising from crystallization
catalogues up to order 32, which prompt us to conjecture, for any lens space
L(p,q) with p greater than 2, the following relation: k(L(p,q)) = 5 + 2
c(L(p,q)), where c(M) denotes the complexity of a 3-manifold M and k(M)+1 is
half the minimum order of a crystallization of M.
