diff --git a/tests/runtests.py b/tests/runtests.py
index e03966410be3..48beb1a3d717 100755
--- a/tests/runtests.py
+++ b/tests/runtests.py
@@ -52,7 +52,8 @@
 # references, which are a minority, so the garbage collection threshold can be
 # larger than the default threshold of 700 allocations + deallocations without
 # much increase in memory usage.
-gc.set_threshold(100_000)
+if not hasattr(sys, "pypy_version_info"):
+    gc.set_threshold(100_000)
 
 RUNTESTS_DIR = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))