Hi Neal,

This seems to be a more general problem than just unicode.

eg. Tuples:

>>> x = [(1, 2, 3, 4, i) for i in xrange(800000)]
>>> del x

And user-defined objects:

>>> class A(object):
...   def __init__(self):
...     self.x = random.random()
>>> x = [A() for i in xrange(800000)]
>>> del x

Both exhibit the same behaviour. Naively to me it seems like using the
custom allocator uniformly would fix this problem.