Memory usage of an 'empty' python interpreter

[neokosmos at gmail.com]

I was wondering what the approximate amount of memory needed to load a
Python interpreter (only, no objects, no scripts, no nothing else) in a
Linux 2.6 environment.  According to ps, it appears to be 3312 bytes,
which seems absurdly low to me.  However, when I check the size of my
Python executable, it looks like it is only about 5600 bytes in size,
so maybe this is reasonable?

Right now, I currently have one bare Python interpreter running and no
other Python programs.  Here is the output of ps -aux | grep python
(headers added for readability):

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME
COMMAND
paul     17561  0.1  0.6  14616  3312 pts/2    S+   02:33   0:00 python
paul     17569  0.0  0.1   2600   520 pts/3    R+   02:34   0:00 grep
python

If I am reading this right, it says the Python interpreter itself is
using 3312 bytes of memory, but has 14616 bytes of shared memory it can
access (which, i assume, is mostly shared libraries).

Here's my ls -l /usr/bin/python2.4:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5424 Jul 21 08:02 /usr/bin/python2.4

Am I interpreting this stuff more or less correctly?

Thanks!