# Direct path membership comparison

Runtime infrastructure validation previously serialized PathService (traffic, connectors, actors and related state) solely to compare passable cells. It now uses matches_passable_cells: count equality, membership and duplicate rejection. It does not cache mutable state or skip the validation. The serialized snapshot validator remains unchanged for save/restore validation.

Reference comparison8 checks PASS: equal, empty, missing, duplicate, different, reordered cells, no mutation and empty graph. Runtime infrastructure integration162 checks PASS, including fault/rollback, route projection and rank expansion. New regression registered under make test-perf.

Same production fixture measured x1 average62.711ms before /62.168ms after; construction phase9.416ms before /9.272ms after. Small single-run difference, not a material performance recovery. The4ms/12ms budgets remain unmet. Remaining major cost is snapshot publication and other infrastructure invariant traversal.

Evidence under artifacts/facility-dimensions-2026-09-29: path-membership.log, membership-infrastructure-regression.log, production-membership-profile.json. No claim of full high-load or Windows performance acceptance.