> I'm not bothered by the regression in "silent_logging",
> as it is a micro benchmark with a very short running time.

I'm not concerned about the micro-benchmark itself but the fact that it
might hint at a wider problem.
Also, I don't get your remark about it running in a short time. Your
patch AFAICT doesn't need any warm up period to exhibit any
improvements.

> Reducing the method-cache size from 2**10 to 2**9 allows the working
> set to fit better in the cache.
> This fixes the regression in "mako", but makes OO programs that use
> few objects (such as richards) a bit slower.

I don't think we should reduce the size of the method cache. 1024 is not
a very large number, and might even be too small for complex OO
programs.

I also think that, apart from the dict storage changes, your patch
should strive not to change any other tunables. Otherwise we're really
comparing apples to oranges.