We do this for the Twiddla sandboxes. The key is that you have to be prepared for everything to evaporate if the server cycles its memory for whatever reason.

We do this for the Twiddla sandboxes. The key is that you have to be prepared for everything to evaporate if the server cycles its memory for whatever reason. In this specific case, we toss everything out of the sandboxes every 5 minutes & reset them anyway, so it's no great tragedy if they clean up after themselves from time to time. For something with a ton of low-priority edits (like HN or Reddit where nobody sues you if their vote goes away), you could certainly get away with caching updates and only saving them out every once in a while.