These are very good points. I'll be honest, I don't have a lot of experience with SmartStack, but I'll be reviewing it. As far as caching, ideally you'd have n

These are very good points. I'll be honest, I don't have a lot of experience with SmartStack, but I'll be reviewing it. As far as caching, ideally you'd have no caching, however, certain optimizations can be made on this front, such as combining in-flight-and-duplicate queries. Load balancing could be done via the SRV records, but that would be difficult since it requires that you republish the SRV record. This could be done every minute or so based on load but not on a per-request basis. Thanks for your insightful comment!