The C structure "PyThreadState" has a counter which is incremented in the bytecode evaluation loop (ceval.c), but never used.

    /* XXX doesn't mean anything anymore (the comment below is obsolete)
       => deprecate or remove? */
    /* tick_counter is incremented whenever the check_interval ticker
     * reaches zero. The purpose is to give a useful measure of the number
     * of interpreted bytecode instructions in a given thread.  This
     * extremely lightweight statistic collector may be of interest to
     * profilers (like psyco.jit()), although nothing in the core uses it.
     */
    int tick_counter;

Antoine Pitrou added the XXX comment when he merged the "new GIL" of Python 3.2.

Can we now remove it?