We use quite a bit of things all the time that don't necessarily change all that often (course details, gradeable metadata, etc.) day to day. We can employ memcache so that these constructs reside in-memory which means that we don't have to hit our DB/file system to get this data on each page-load, but just have them in cache which should provide some efficiency improvements.

Initially, we'll just cache the course details, and then move more things to the cache as it makes sense.