Re: bbpress and memcache?
Hmm, well this all sounds promising’ish.
I asked Sam Bauers at WordCamp NZ how bbPress would compare speed-wise and server resource wise to other standard forum softwares like phpBB, SMF, vBulletin etc. He said that the others were probably faster on a shared hosting environment, but when mem-caching is running that bbPress leaps ahead in performance. Sam, perhaps you were referring to forums which REQUIRE mem-cache (ie: super large forums) running better on bbPress than the other softwares?
At any rate it sounds like for my purposes that I shouldn’t worry about these things too much and just stick with using it straight out of the box.