Question about garbage collection

[Martin Bertolino]

I was looking at the C source for the Pyhon intepreter and I have noticed
that it uses a reference counting mechanism for it garbage collection
scheme. I like the simplicity of this scheme, but I know it has problems
with data structures that have references to themselves, no being properly
collected and eventually leaked.

In real/average/day to day development of applications in Python, how often
does this becomes a problem?, and how do you code around it, if possible?

Thanks

Martin