XF 2.3 Graceful Redis failure?

[Ridemonkey]

I'm running my test server with Redis (stock config, not Xon's addon), and it works fine.

However, it doesn't gracefully fail - if Redis is unavailable, the whole site errors out.

I have 'timeout' => 1 in the configuration, but it doesn't seem to help.

Is this expected behavior? Is there a way to permit Redis to fail and simply degrade site performance rather than taking the site down entirely? The Cache doc for XF doesn't list any other timeout configurations that are permitted.