CIRIS fabric · measured performance

What one ordinary CPU core can do —
with post-quantum proof on every byte.

Every number below is measured on a GitHub Actions runner. No projections, no marketing math — run it yourself and you get these numbers.

4,946

per second

post-quantum-signed events ingested on a single CPU core (verify → decompose → persist)

leaks

cross-group data leakage measured across 400 nodes — isolation is enforced by construction, not by policy

5.1

GiB/s · core

end-to-end encryption throughput per core — the cryptography is never the bottleneck

97.6%

recovery

the stored corpus rebuilds with 20% of its holders offline (measured RaptorQ erasure trials)

Throughput & latency measured

Each row is a criterion microbenchmark on the CI runner. The plain-English sentence is the takeaway; the value is the raw measurement; the last column is the exact bench id.

what it means	measured	bench
One CPU core can decrypt about this many gigabytes of video per second on the receive side.	5.11GiB/s/core	`av_frame_halves/open/16384`
One CPU core absorbs about this many fresh signed traces per second (verify + decompose + persist).	4,946traces/s/core	`replication_ingest/ingest_new`
Re-delivered (already-seen) traces are rejected at about this rate — still paying full signature verify, so a gossip flood is bounded by verify speed.	5,495traces/s/core	`replication_ingest/ingest_dedup`
Relaying one small (~208 B) blinking-dot frame through one mesh hop costs about this many microseconds of CPU.	0.44µs/hop	`alm_chain_hop/208`
Sealing 2,000 simultaneous blob streams at 30 fps uses about this fraction of one CPU core.	0.02core-fraction @ N=2000, 30fps	`stream_fanout_seal_tick/2000`
Computing one agent's coherence-capacity score over a full 500-trace window takes about this many microseconds.	49.39µs/agent @ N=500 traces	`n_eff_e2e/500`
Starting one post-quantum key exchange (X25519 + ML-KEM-768) takes about this many microseconds.	67.59µs	`pqc_kex/hybrid_initiate`
Starting one classical-only (X25519) key exchange takes about this many microseconds.	39.07µs	`pqc_kex/classical_initiate`
Sealing then opening one 16 KiB 720p video frame end-to-end takes about this many microseconds.	7.03µs/frame	`av_frame_e2e/16384`

The mesh — propagation & isolation measured

The production FountainSwarmRuntime (the same code the node ships) run in-process on the runner. A publisher in group A reaches every group-A peer; the cohort gate means group B is never in the closure, so its leak count is structurally zero — and that's exactly what the measurement shows at every scale.

nodes	group-A converged	propagation
50	24 / 24	5.9ms
100	49 / 49	6.8ms
200	99 / 99	6.3ms
400	199 / 199	7.1ms

Replication A→B: A signed holding-claim emitted at node A is observed at node B over the real in-process swarm path in about this many milliseconds. Emitted 1, observed 1 at ~6.5 ms.

Resilience — surviving churn measured

Content is split into redundant fountain shares across holders; this is the measured chance it can still be rebuilt as each tier's fraction of holders goes offline. Empirical reconstruction rate from real encode→drop→decode trials against the substrate's own codec — not a survival formula. Config: ciris_edge codec-fountain (RaptorQ RFC 6330) · 20 source + 10 repair shares across 30 holders.

network condition	holders offline	recovered	trials
datacenter	5%	100%	4,000
typical wifi	10%	100%	4,000
medium churn (design target)	15%	99.7%	4,000
high churn	20%	97.6%	4,000
battlefield mesh	30%	72.7%	4,000

The honest cost of post-quantum proof measured

We don't hide this: a post-quantum signature is real work. Per signed event, the hybrid Ed25519 + ML-DSA-65 sign+verify is 550 µs vs 35.9 µs for classical Ed25519 alone — about 15×. ML-DSA dominates; that's the price of being quantum-resistant today, measured rather than waved away. Even so, a single core still ingests ~4,946 of these signed events per second — the verify is one stage of a pipeline, and throughput stays high.

How it holds up

Peers relay for peers

A small relay tree forwards traffic between participants, so capacity grows as people join instead of requiring bigger servers. The relays forward sealed bytes they can never read.

Post-quantum end-to-end

Every event and stream is signed and encrypted with hybrid classical + post-quantum cryptography (Ed25519+ML-DSA, X25519+ML-KEM). The provenance survives a future quantum computer.

Redundant, recoverable storage

The corpus is split into fountain-coded shares spread across holders, so it rebuilds even as a large fraction of them go offline — the resilience table above is measured, not assumed.