I have redone my memory benchmark, and added a few new counters. The application is a very small Django application. The same source code of the app and Django itself is used on all Python versions. The full list of results is at http://www.dcl.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/home/loewis/djmemprof/ Here are some excerpts: A. 32-bit builds, storage for Unicode objects 3.x, 32-bit wchar_t: 6378540 3.x, 16-bit wchar_t: 3694694 PEP 393: 2216807 Compared to the previous results, there are now some significant savings even compared to a narrow unicode build. B. 3.x, number of strings by maxchar: ASCII: 35713 (1,300,000 chars) Latin-1: 235 (11,000 chars) BMP: 260 (700 chars) other: 0 total: 36,000 (1,310,000 chars) This explains why the savings for shortening ASCII objects are significant in this application. I have no good intuition how this effect would show for "real" applications. It may be that the percentage of ASCII strings (in number and chars) grows proportionally with the total number of strings; it may also be that the majority of these strings is a certain fixed overhead (resulting from Python identifiers and other interned strings). C. String-ish objects in 2.7 and 3.3-trunk: 2.x 3.x #unicode 370 36,000 #bytes 43,000 14,000 #total 43,400 50,000 len(unicode) 5,300 1,306,000 len(bytes) 2,040,000 860,000 len(total) 2,046,000 2,200,000 (Note: the computations in the results are slightly messed up: the number of bytes for bytes objectts is actually the sum of the lengths, not the sum of the sizeofs; this gets added in the "total" lines to the sum of sizeofs of unicode strings, which is non-sensical. The table above corrects this) As you can see, Python 3 creates more string objects in total. D. Memory consumption for 2.x, 3.x, PEP 393, accounting both unicode and bytes objects, using 32-bit builds and 32-bit wchar_t: 2.x: 3,620,000 bytes 3.x: 7,750,000 bytes PEP 393: 3,340,000 bytes This suggests that PEP 393 actually reduces memory consumption below what 2.7 uses. This is offset though by "other" (non-string) objects, which take 300KB more in 3.x. Regards, Martin