diff --git a/megatron/tokenizer/gpt2_tokenization.py b/megatron/tokenizer/gpt2_tokenization.py
index 3f37e4490..bce13e8ec 100644
--- a/megatron/tokenizer/gpt2_tokenization.py
+++ b/megatron/tokenizer/gpt2_tokenization.py
@@ -78,7 +78,6 @@ def bytes_to_unicode():
 
 def get_pairs(word):
     """Return set of symbol pairs in a word.
-
     Word is represented as tuple of symbols (symbols being variable-length strings).
     """
     pairs = set()
@@ -153,8 +152,14 @@ def from_pretrained(cls, pretrained_model_name_or_path, cache_dir=None, *inputs,
             **kwargs)
         return tokenizer
 
+
     def __init__(self, vocab_file, merges_file, errors='replace',
-                 special_tokens=None, max_len=None):
+                 special_tokens=None, max_len=None, max_token_len_cache=9):
+        """
+        max_token_len_cache determines whether a normalized token will be cached. It tries to only store shorter tokens in the cache, 
+        with the heuristic that they are more frequent. Increasing this may make tokenization faster but will also take more memory. 
+        The upper bound of the normalized token cache is fixed at 1_000_000 tokens.
+        """
         self.max_len = max_len if max_len is not None else int(1e12)
         self.encoder = json.load(open(vocab_file))
         self.decoder = {v: k for k, v in self.encoder.items()}
@@ -164,8 +169,6 @@ def __init__(self, vocab_file, merges_file, errors='replace',
         bpe_data = open(merges_file, encoding='utf-8').read().split('\n')[1:-1]
         bpe_merges = [tuple(merge.split()) for merge in bpe_data]
         self.bpe_ranks = dict(zip(bpe_merges, range(len(bpe_merges))))
-        self.cache = {}
-
         # Should haved added re.IGNORECASE so BPE merges can happen for
         # capitalized versions of contractions
         self.pat = re.compile(
@@ -174,6 +177,7 @@ def __init__(self, vocab_file, merges_file, errors='replace',
         self.special_tokens = {}
         self.special_tokens_decoder = {}
         self.set_special_tokens(special_tokens)
+        self.max_token_len_cache = max_token_len_cache
 
     def __len__(self):
         return len(self.encoder) + len(self.special_tokens)
@@ -191,10 +195,9 @@ def set_special_tokens(self, special_tokens):
                                    for i, tok in enumerate(special_tokens))
         self.special_tokens_decoder = {v: k for k, v in self.special_tokens.items()}
         logger.info("Special tokens {}".format(self.special_tokens))
-
+    
+    @lru_cache(1_000_000)
     def bpe(self, token):
-        if token in self.cache:
-            return self.cache[token]
         word = tuple(token)
         pairs = get_pairs(word)
 
@@ -230,20 +233,33 @@ def bpe(self, token):
             else:
                 pairs = get_pairs(word)
         word = ' '.join(word)
-        self.cache[token] = word
         return word
+      
+    @lru_cache(1_000_000)
+    def normalize_token_and_cache(self, token):
+        return self.normalize_token(token)
+    
+    def normalize_token(self, token):
+          token = ''.join(self.byte_encoder[b] for b in token.encode('utf-8'))
+          ret = [bpe_token for bpe_token in self.bpe(token).split(' ')]
+          return ret
 
     def tokenize(self, text):
         """ Tokenize a string. """
+        max_token_len_cache = self.max_token_len_cache
         bpe_tokens = []
+        if sys.version_info[0] == 2:
+          for token in re.findall(self.pat, text):        
+              token = ''.join(self.byte_encoder[ord(b)] for b in token)
+              bpe_tokens.extend(bpe_token for bpe_token in self.bpe(token).split(' '))
+          return bpe_tokens
         for token in re.findall(self.pat, text):
-            if sys.version_info[0] == 2:
-                token = ''.join(self.byte_encoder[ord(b)] for b in token)
-            else:
-                token = ''.join(self.byte_encoder[b] for b in token.encode('utf-8'))
-            bpe_tokens.extend(bpe_token for bpe_token in self.bpe(token).split(' '))
+          if len(token) <= max_token_len_cache:
+              bpe_tokens.extend(self.normalize_token_and_cache(token))
+          else: 
+              bpe_tokens.extend(self.normalize_token(token))
         return bpe_tokens
-
+      
     def convert_tokens_to_ids(self, tokens):
         """ Converts a sequence of tokens into ids using the vocab. """
         ids = []
diff --git a/tools/preprocess_data.py b/tools/preprocess_data.py
index 9001af5cd..73e268459 100644
--- a/tools/preprocess_data.py
+++ b/tools/preprocess_data.py
@@ -21,10 +21,9 @@
 import os
 import sys
 
-from megatron.data.indexed_dataset import best_fitting_dtype
-
 sys.path.append(os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__),
                                              os.path.pardir)))
+from megatron.data.indexed_dataset import best_fitting_dtype
 import time
 
 import torch