The last pages of a deep reverse page-through on a forward-only backend
each walked down to 1970 one x4 growth step at a time (~14-16 reads,
~2.5 s live). After two empty segments the walk now asks once per page
for the whole remainder at the page budget (a truncated answer is
discarded and the walk carries on), and the stretch the page's last
complete read proved empty rides the continuation point
(HistoryContinuationState.EmptyFromTicks/EmptyToTicks, session-held, so
no versioning) so the next page steps over it. Fuzz now pages with the
walk's own hints and with true random empty stretches.
ReverseRawReader aimed every segment at half of MaxTieClusterOverfetch
(~32k rows by default) and carried that width page to page, so a paged
'latest N' read on a dense Gateway tag fetched ~32,770 rows per page
(2-5 s live) to return N. The walk now lives in a generic ReverseWalk
core: segments are aimed at ~N+8 rows (page budget 2N+16), a discovery
segment (first without a hint / after an empty one) may read 1,024, and
the tie budget is only the ceiling a single-timestamp cluster escalates
to. A truncated read never re-enters the stretch below its newest row
until the gap above it is bisected. Tests: per-page row counts on a
dense tag (node manager + walk), randomized exactness fuzz (walk and
node-manager paging), dense-tag-below-a-long-gap read bound.
Joseph Doherty