Issue 16908: Enhancing performance and memory usage (original) (raw)

The "performance" you're measuring here is mostly startup, i.e. loading all necessary modules. On Python 3, there is more to load, e.g. the filesystem encoding, therefore startup takes a little longer.

There are efforts to improve startup time, see e.g. #16101.

The memory consumption is expected, again due to more modules loaded. You cannot make any statement about the memory usage of a real-world application by just measuring the overhead of the interpreter.

The memory usage due to strings should be very similar to Python 2 starting with Python 3.3, due to PEP 393.