The registry middleware used to GET the user's hold's /.well-known/did.json on every registry request in testmode builds, and fall back to the appview default hold if it did not answer. The fallback only ever changed anything when the user's chosen hold differed from the default AND was down; in local development and in the integration harness the two are the same hold, so the probe's answer was discarded every time. In the production-shaped benchmark it was 94 of 150 hold requests per p90 push and 23 of 90 per pull, hiding the real hold traffic behind a testmode artifact. Remove isHoldReachable, the fallbackUnreachable field, and the probe branch. An empty choice still means the default hold. Testmode and production now take the same path here. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WTdBxLFU5TpwmqVdVsN1wq