So I did some more testing/prototypes and got the following results:

* Baseline results: 0.60522294044495 seconds
* Memcached per behavior results: 1.1967959403992 seconds
* Non-persistent caching using static properties: 0.41918110847473
* Persistent caching using memcache + Cache class (with static properties): 0.41816210746765

I've made a [gist of the various patches](https://gist.github.com/markstory/7226799)