How to limit users to one comment per post

I am using WordPress as a petition site and hacking the comments system to work as the petition signup. I would like to find out how I can limit a user to post only one comment per post. So far I can limit each user to one comment on the whole WordPress site as shown in the code below, but that’s not what I am looking to accomplish.

When should I be using the Transients API?

I’ve never used the Transients API before and was wondering if anyone has guidance on when to use it. The Codex article implies that as a theme developer I might want to set each new WP_Query() as a transient; I assume the same might be said for direct $wpdb queries and query_posts(). Is that overkill? And/Or are there other places I should default to using it?