The in-memory fix is really the most important - the disk space was a bonus and an easy metric to gather.
As you can see, I've implemented a similar solution in 3.3. It should have the same memory savings but not disk space saving. (This would require reintroducing the marshal feature for interned strings.)
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Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue12190>
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