About your point the pocket’s solution is good and easy way for developers with no node experience or didn’t want to hastle with load scaling type of stuff on that part. Personally I always prefer local node for performance and many other reasons. Because it has single point of failure that’s our problem. Rhizome also deployed several clusters and put a load balancer in front of that. We will also give that a try soon to measure performance. Lastly I agree there are some resource on network by sub prep nodes and from or monitor high percentage of them doesn’t look stable.