On Oct 11, 2006, at 10:30 PM, Mike Orr wrote:

> There seems to be a multiplicative effect with Durus: adding/removing
> a string or collection: it has a significantly larger effect on memory
> use than the size of the object itself.  For instance, every record
> has:
>    .name   # unicode
>    .synonyms  # list of unicode
> The total number of characters in all names and synonyms is just under
> 2 million. You might assume these multibyte characters use 4 MB total,
> or maybe 8 MB max.  However, changing the names to short numeric
> strings and replacing the synonyms with an empty list lowers the
> memory usage by 60 MB!

This seems llike a Python issue more than a Durus one.

I wonder, though, if you could save a lot of RAM by
using intern() calls in a __setstate__() implementation.
If you are using the names as keys in a BTree, there
is another copy there, too, and there might be another
chance to use intern() for some advantage.