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I have read the exc_info suggestions before, but they have 
never made any difference. Neither change you suggest 
modifies the memory footprint behaviour in any way.

Weakrefs might be slow, I offered them as an alternative to 
just removing the references entirely. I understand this 
might cause problems with existing code, but the current 
situation causes a problem which is more difficult to work 
around. Code that needs locals and globals can explicity 
store a reference to eat - it is impossible to dig in to 
the traceback object and remove those references.
The use-case of storing the exc_info is fairly simple, for 
example:
Two threads. One queues a task for the other to complete. 
That task fails an raises an exception. The exc_info is 
caught, passed back to the first thread, the exc_info is 
raised from there. The goal is to get the whole execution 
stack, which it does quite nicely, except that it has this 
terrible memory side effect.