I hope I'm not missing something obvious, but I've been trying to figure out what's going on in wpmu-functions.php in places like like 531 where there is a time check:
if( ( $most_active[ 'time' ] + 60 ) < time() ) { // cache for 60 seconds.
Best I can tell, no such caching is taking place here, as the variable being checked never exists. I'm not entirely clear on how the wp_cache_* functions decide if content is stale, and I know that get_site_option is using wp_cache_get, so maybe caching is still happening there and this is just stale code.
I'm trying to write an efficient get_latest_updated_blogs() and am following the pattern of get_most_active_blogs but would like to cache as aggressively as possible...