On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Antoine Pitrou <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:

> If I read your [Martin v. Löwis' ] patch correctly, collisions will
> produce additional allocations ... That's a pretty massive
> change in memory consumption for string dicts

Not in practice.

The point I first missed is that this triggers only when the hash is
*fully* equal; if the hashes are merely equal after masking, then
today's try-another-slot approach will still be used, even for
strings.

Per ( http://bugs.python.org/issue13703#msg151850 ) Marc-Andre
Lemburg's measurements, full-hash equality explains only 1 in 10,000
collisions.  From a performance standpoint, we can almost ignore a
case that rare; it is almost certainly dwarfed by resizing.

I *am* a bit concerned that the possible contents of a dictentry
change; this could cause easily-missed-in-testing breakage for
anything that treats table as an array.  That said, it doesn't seem
much worse than the search finger, and there seemed to be recent
consensus that even promising an exact dict -- subclasses not allowed
-- didn't mean that direct access was sanctioned.  So it still seems
safer than changing the de-facto iteration order.