BTW, because of the way cpython handles memory management of strings, the additional memory usage is not much more than 1048 bytes. Cpython (the default implementation) refers to strings of the exact same content as the exact same object. It's safe to do that since strings are not mutable. [Here's more detail on that.](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2123925/when-does-python-allocate-new-memory-for-identical-strings)