The governance decision costs 258 nanoseconds.
What costs is reading the text — and that is a bill you already pay. These are measured figures from the internal technical evidence report, on one commodity workstation, with the tail and the outliers printed rather than trimmed.
Where the time actually goes
Each stage timed in isolation on the stated platform. The deterministic core is not the bottleneck; embedding generation is.
| Stage | Latency | Throughput |
|---|---|---|
| Embedding, single text (CPU) | 55.8 ms | 18/s |
| Fixed-point adapter, 768-dim | 9.0 µs | ~110,000/s |
| Dual-reference integer gate | 10.3 µs | 97,490/s |
| Friction Gate | 258 ns | 3,880,000/s |
| Proof binding — SHA3 + HMAC | 11.4 µs | 87,719/s |
| Durable 64-record group commit | — | 29,618/s |
| Full post-embedding decision path | 469 µs | 2,132/s |
Embedding generation dominates by two orders of magnitude. Every governance stage after it — the gate, the integer comparison, the proof binding — completes in microseconds or less.
50,000 timed decisions, tail included
Percentiles from the corrected full-path stress run. An earlier set of throughput figures was withdrawn after a harness artefact was found; these replace them.
| Percentile | Latency |
|---|---|
| p50 | 406.9 µs |
| p90 | 765.3 µs |
| p99 | 1.351 ms |
| p99.9 | 2.595 ms |
| max | 30.832 ms |
Where parallelism stops paying
Synchronized steady-state benchmark. Efficiency is reported against the single-worker reference, including where it falls away.
| Workers | Throughput | Speed-up · efficiency |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2,132/s | 1.00× |
| 2 | 3,854/s | 1.81× · ~90% |
| 4 | 6,181/s | 2.90× · ~72% |
| 8 | 7,373/s | 3.46× · ~43% |
Efficiency drops to roughly 43% at eight workers, which is hyper-thread saturation on this machine rather than a property of the architecture. A separate, more instrumented four-worker harness measured about 4,800/s under a different evidence-recording configuration; the two are not directly comparable and neither is a distributed system rate.
The same input, the same bits
The claim the rest of the platform rests on, stated as it was measured.
1,000 / 1,000
Identical digests across repeated runs on the same input and pinned environment.
10,000 → 0.195 s
Prototype hash-chain replay: ten thousand ledger records verified in under a fifth of a second.
What this is not
The boundary of these figures
Carried over from the report's own limitations section, unedited. A number is only worth what its scope statement allows.
- One commodity workstation — not a distributed or multi-node measurement.
- Prototype stage. Not a certification, accreditation, or production authorisation.
- No FIPS-validated cryptography or hardware-backed WORM media.
- No accredited red team or independent semantic-layer assessment.
- Production WORM and multi-node authority remain outstanding.
- Not independently reproduced; the verification script becomes an audit only when a third party runs it.
The rest of the evidence
The conformance study carries the policy-accuracy side of the same engine, and the security page states the current assurance position in full — including what we do not hold.