In the case of task queue chaining, as in the linked question, it may be best to just send the cursor in the payload for the next task (which is also mentioned in the documentation.) Memcache is fine if occasionally losing your place and starting over is acceptable. In theory if you're storing a small bit of data in memcache and using it soon afterwards it's unlikely to be evicted, although of course you should do some testing to see that you get an acceptably low rate of cache misses and watch out for situations where the memcache service being unavailable will do something really bad.