> Relevant? Yes. > Gating? No. > > In fact, I would put it the other way around. > The architecture documentis very useful, almost necessary, for deciding > whether the solution is a good one. > The cache management evaluations are another component of such an > evaluation. > Even understanding the cache management question is made significantly > easier by having a clean architecture description. Indeed. At the risk of straining things with an analogy, I'll liken this to architecture of a building. At the architecture level, we do have to consider, say, bathrooms, and it's reasonable at that level to talk about having bathrooms on each floor, and perhaps the extent to which accessible bathrooms are needed. Deciding whether to have two pairs or three per floor is something that can be left to the detailed post-architecture specifications, and things like what sorts of fixtures to put in them *absolutely* come later. No one is saying that some discussion of caching issues (etc) won't be needed in defining and specifying the architecture. We're just saying that it's not necessary to do the caching document before, as long as the related discussion that happens at the architecture stage is preserved for when it's time to work on the caching doc. Barry