Python - do big doc strings waste memory?

Question

I understand that in Python a string is simply an expression and a string by itself would be garbage collected immediately upon return of control to a code's caller, but...

1. Large class/method doc strings in your code: do they waste memory by building the string objects up?
2. Module level doc strings: are they stored infinitely by the interpreter?

Does this even matter? My only concern came from the idea that if I'm using a large framework like Django, or multiple large open source libraries, they tend to be very well documented with potentially multiple megabytes of text. In these cases are the doc strings loaded into memory for code that's used along the way, and then kept there, or is it collected immediately like normal strings?

Answer 1

• "I understand that in Python a string is simply an expression and a string by itself would be garbage collected immediately upon return of control to a code's caller" indicates a misunderstanding, I think. A docstring is evaluated once (not on every function call) and stays alive at least as long as the function does.

• "Does this even matter?" when it comes to optimization is not answered by thinking about it abstractly but by measuring. "Multiple megabytes" of text isn't probably isn't a lot in a memory-intensive application. The solution for saving memory likely lives elsewhere and you can determine whether that is the case by measurement.

• Python's -OO command line switch removes docstrings.