I don't think an average is useful in any way here. It will reduce the heap use by some amount, since you reduce the number of char arrays in N strings to some

I don't think an average is useful in any way here. It will reduce the heap use by some amount, since you reduce the number of char arrays in N strings to some number less than - or equal - than N. There won't be any new arrays allocated. But in my team alone, we have services which deal with many equal but transient strings, some services with long-living, mostly equal strings, some services with long-living, radically different strings. In some of them, I expect rather massive reductions, in others, interning probably has most of the work done already and in others, there's no application or the GC will handle the issue already.