Recycling a node no longer competes with the portal's routing

The mesh's root hub is its router: every message between two hubs passes through it, one at a time. Work executed there does not merely run slowly — it takes turns away from routing, and a burst of it starves the ordinary SubscribeRequest traffic that makes pages appear. That is what wedged a production portal on 2026-06-11.

Recycle — the MCP tool, and the Compile button that shares its code path — posted its teardown straight from the router. So did RecycleNode, the framework's one recycle surface. Neither was slow on its own; both put node-hub lifecycle on the one action block that must never queue. Both now hand the teardown to the mesh's dedicated off-router hub first. For every caller that already held a session, portal or per-node hub — which is nearly all of them — nothing changes at all: the hop is the identity function for any hub that is not the router.

The half that mattered more

A ratchet already existed to stop exactly this, and it did not see it. It matched a literal list of six node-CRUD request names, and a teardown is not one of them — so the most router-hostile message in the mesh was invisible to it, and the only thing that noticed was a runtime detector firing in production (#4463). Adding "teardown" to the list would have bought exactly one more message.

The guard now derives what counts as lifecycle from the framework's own handler registrations — the ones a hub makes for itself at construction, and the ones the node-operation hub makes — and filters them through the same predicate the runtime detector evaluates. You cannot add a lifecycle message without registering a handler for it, so a new one joins the guard automatically; a name in a test can be forgotten, a handler cannot. On its first run the derivation picked up a verb the hand-written list had already missed.

What this does not change: the older, broader #1140 family stays open. Its remaining strand is a stream unsubscribe, which has no equivalent seam and whose origin hub is a correlation question rather than a routing one — see Router Traffic Detection.