[stickfigure]

Agreed.

I spent a little time working with Guido on cache design for the App Engine data access api (ndb). In Java-land, it's a big win to cache datastore entities in memcache because fetch latency is about an order of magnitude faster. In Python-land, caching is a mixed bag - real-world profiling found marginal benefit even with 100% hit rate, and a significant performance disadvantage if the hit rate drops off. This is primarily attributed to pickling overhead.

If you're curious, here are the benchmarks (from 2011): https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/datastore-ndb-python/...