Reading a collection config no longer leaves a hub behind

Reading which content collections a node has — what the file browser, the content areas and the collection: path all resolve through — went through a ContentCollectionReference, and the workspace caches one stream per reference so repeated reads share it. That cache was never hit.

ContentCollectionReference is a record whose only member is a list of collection names, and a record with a collection member does not get value equality from the compiler: it compares the list object, not its contents. Two reads of the same collection therefore produced two references that were never equal, the cache missed every time, and each miss built a fresh synchronization stream with its own hosted sync/ hub — about 390 KB of DI scope, type registry and serializer options — that lived until the node hub itself died.

The reference now compares by collection name, so the reads share one stream and the population is bounded by how many distinct collections a hub has instead of by how many times anyone looked. Nothing about what a read returns has changed. The two sibling references with the same shape, AggregateWorkspaceReference and CombinedStreamReference, were given the same treatment.

It was found on a running portal. A live in-process census attributed all 312 of a replica's sync/ hubs to the stream that minted each one, found 80 duplicates of a value-identical (host, reference) pair, and then separated the two possible causes by comparing the reference objects already on the heap: every duplicate group but one compared equal — those are caller-specific streams that retire with their caller. The one that did not was twenty-four copies of (Doc/Architecture, collection/content), up from eighteen half an hour earlier.

A guard now refuses any workspace reference whose record equality would compare an array, a non-string sequence or a Lazy<> by reference without a hand-written Equals. The full measurement, and the census itself so it is not lost a third time, are in A Reference That Cannot Be a Key.