Also, too, let me say that besides being well aware of the transient nature of RAM (I write code to analyze data on raw die from Teradyne testers for a living, these days!), as I stated, I'm interested in why the code doesn't work.
Spending a few cycles finding out why something doesn't work leads to greater understanding of the process. I suspect that the answer to my Server Internal Error is in the raw newness of my embperl understanding and is unrelated to the use of memcached specifically.