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Here is yet another try, which seems to perform better on my PentiumIII.  I get the following speed improvements for this patch alone, for a loop calling an empty function:

zombie-frames.diff: 11.4%      (PyStone 3.8%)
scary-frame-hacks.diff: 6.4%   (PyStone 0.85%)

The idea is to get rid of the free_list and instead store the most recently finished ("zombie") frame in an internal field of the code object.  This saves half of the frame creation overhead because half of the fields are already correct when the frame is reused, e.g. f_code, f_nlocals, f_stacksize, f_valuestack...

(you might need to cvs up frameobject.c before you can apply the patch)