Russian text is getting mangled in php / vbulletin on my test server. I don't think php is compiled with proper support for russian characters.
i won't be able to get to that one just yet, sorry
However, about the memory load on the improved cache..
I write a script to crawl wowhead and import tons of items, and modified my code a little bit to show memory used before the cache variable is created and after.
Number of Rows: 12483
05:06:13 called in wowhead_item::CreateCache:54 Memory before: 3,782,776
05:06:14 called in wowhead_item::CreateCache:65 Memory after: 9,260,188 ( 5,477,412)
12480 items using 5.4mb of memory or 438 bytes per item. I don't consider this to bad since most databases will only have 400-500 items, maybe 1,000, which would put memory around 440k
Going to push through and crawl item IDs up to 55,000 and see how large i can make this.