A small note for everyone. The server we are on leverages a few different types of caching (Varnish, Memcached, PHP APC, and storage L2 caching) none of what we have control over as the web hosting package doesn’t grant us access to control these server-side settings.
My gut tells me (and I am not a programmer by any means) that, at least in our case, the PHP operator is trying to call a serialized and cached object before the server is ready to serve it which crashes the page. I wondering if reworking the function calls a bit would resolve this overall.