Hello, There are recurring complaints about the garbage collector degrading performance when lots of objects are created in a row. In issue #4074, I've proposed a patch which basically implements Martin's suggestion in http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-June/080579.html to base the decision to do a full collection on the ratio between the number of objects surviving the (n-1) generation collection and the number of long-lived objects. I've also added a condition so that this new behaviour is only triggered when there are more than 10000 long-lived objects -- therefore, cycles will still get collected quickly in lightweight programs. In Gregory's simple test of storing many tuples in a list, the behaviour has indeed changed from exponential to linear. Is anybody opposed to the principle of this proposal? Antoine.