[Python-Dev] What to intern (e.g. func_code.co_filename)?

[Jake McGuire]

Has anyone come up with rules of thumb for what to intern and what the
performance implications of interning are?

I'm working on profiling App Engine again, and since they don't allow
marshall I have to modify pstats to save the profile via pickle.
While trying to get profiles under 1MB, I noticed that each function
has its own copy of the filename in which it is defined, and sometimes
these strings can be rather long.

Creating a code object already interns a bunch of stuff; argument
names, variable names, etc.  Interning the filename will add some CPU
overhead during function creation, should save a decent amount of
memory, and ought to have minimal overall performance impact.

I have a local patch, but wanted to see if anyone had ideas or
experience weighing these tradeoffs.

-jake