Why does sys.getrefcount give huge values?

Question

import sys

a = 10
b = a
print sys.getrefcount(a)
b=1
print sys.getrefcount(b)

output:

22 614

Is there any problem with my

Answer 1

You can see the effects of Python's optimizations (see @Nether's answer) if you change the values to non-trivial ones. For instance, if your code is changed to:

from __future__ import print_function

import sys

a = 1012345
b = a
print(sys.getrefcount(a))
b=12345678
print(sys.getrefcount(b))

The output is:

5
4