I'm trying to avoid having to requery and reprocess data for the cache every time the server reloads in development (pyramid framework).
Is there an easy way to set up dogpile's memory backend, dogpile.cache.memory, so that its persistence is independent from my web server, or do I need a backend like redis or memcached for this?
Not really. It is a memory within the running python process. Once the application reloads, the process gets killed and re-started, the memory is gone. Using a file backend (like DBMBackend) might be a solution for you.
On the other hand, if you are on unix, installing and using memcached is easy.